and he ultimately accepted. and that ultimately made him change the way the u.s. government worked and the way that drug development worked, and that forcibly u-turned to the futurebl of the aids epidem in this country.ds how many other people could do that? dr. anthony fauci has now spent 38 years as the head of niad, the visible and active leader of the nation s response to infectious zooedna diseases of l kinds from hiv and aids, tose t ones we don t necessarily remember off the top of our o heads, ebola, or zika, sars, mrss, bird flu and now monkeypox and polio, and of course, covid, these past two and a half years. today dr. fauci announced he is retiring at the end of this year. heth will turn 82 before he goe in 8 december. dr. fauci first joined the nih in 1968 when he was 27 years old and lbj was president, it was ronald reagan who put him in
have learned lessons from outbreaks in the past like hiv, and ebola and zika and pandemic influenza, and challenges of the possibility of bird flu turning into a pandemic. in some respects, the situation has a rooted. i think it has in the sense of neglecting of the capabilities of the local public health officials because, if you want to respond to an emerging infection, you do need leadership from above. you need central support from the government, at the local level. you also have to have the kind of resources that will allow you to respond. you know, we learned, and i hope we are still learning a very important lesson from covid that you never, ever underestimate an emerging infection in which you don t know where it s going because we ve been fooled before. we didn t fully appreciate the
enough to respond. i hope that lesson has been learned. as we look forward to the inevitability, of future outbreaks, we will not forget that lesson. are we facing an increased pace of threat from emerging infectious diseases? i mean, obviously, the world the changing nature of the covid pandemic is enough on its own. you know, now, monkeypox, and the reemergence of polio, and, you know, in recent years, the bullet, sars, zika, all these others, it is there an increased pace of threat from new and resurgent viruses, or are we just, sort of, more aware of it with these recent ones? no, it is not more aware of it, rachel. it is, and there are probably a number of conflicts, reasons why that is the case. if you look at the outbreaks you just enumerated a moment
hiv/aids crisis, zika, and obviously most notably covid. that is where he became a serious political hot button issue. he is somebody that progressives and democrats continue to hold up as kind of a paragon of what the government is supposed to be about and he is somebody that conservatives have villified and become the face of many of the policies conservatives push back very sharply against, whether it s masking or the shutdowns that transpired in the early days of the covid pandemic. he obviously had very sharp disagreements with former president donald trump, most of which were behind the scenes and spilled out publicly in the wake of that and has become a rallying cry for some republicans, fire fauci, which didn t start with republicans and covid, it was aids and hiv activists when he was leading in that role. he eventually came to side with them on many of those issues. that has not happened with covid. he s been the chief medical advisor to president biden. president biden very
seven different presidents of different political parties and he really saw the country go through different major public health crises from hiv and aids to ebola and zika, and then of course in the last two years or so, he has really become the face of the country s fight against the covid pandemic and in some ways has been a divisive figure. he has been a real hero to so many people across the country, sort of the voice of reason and talking about the science of the pandemic and trying to reassure people through a very scary time, and for other people, he is more of sort of the villain figure, he represented for a lot of people the government essentially being able to tell people you should do this or shouldn t do that, as we go through the covid pandemic, and president biden who is vacationing here right now in rehoboth beach, he put out a lengthy statement expressing his gratitude for dr. fauci s service to the country. he said in part, i ve been able to call him at any hour of the