Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical officer to the president of the United States, will reportedly retire by the end of President Joe Biden’s term.
According to Politico on Monday, Fauci said he will retire by the end of Biden’s term following more than five decades of federal service under seven different presidential administrations.
The 81-year-old has worked for over 50 years in the American public health sector, including working as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984.
He later became the face of the American government’s policies regarding efforts to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, becoming the lead figure on both Donald Trump and Biden’s coronavirus response teams.
In a recent interview, Fauci admitted that the world will be living with coronavirus for quite some time.
“We’re in a pattern now. If somebody says, ‘You’ll leave when we don’t have COVID anymore,’ then I will be 105. I think we’re going to be living with this,” he said. “What we have right now, I think we’re almost at a steady state.”
This comes months after Sen. Rand Paul introduced a bill that would “eliminate Dr. Anthony Fauci’s position” and divide his power into three separate institutes.
In an opinion piece written in March, Paul called Fauci a “dictator in chief,” saying that no person should have “unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans.”
“No one person should have the sole authority to dictate science, especially when that one person wasn’t ever following the science,” he wrote. “I’ve said that from the beginning, and I’ve been proven right over, and over, and over again. On masks, lockdowns, schools, natural immunity, all of it.”
Going over his proposed bill, the Republican lawmaker suggested having three institutes that will be led by a director who is appointed by the president for a five-year term.
“This will create accountability and oversight into a taxpayer-funded position that has largely abused its power and has been responsible for many failures and misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the senator explained.
Paul also noted that the “biggest victims” of the lockdowns were children, claiming that remote learning had a negative impact on children’s mental health.
