Dr. Anthony Fauci, who began his career at the National Institutes of Health during Lyndon Johnson’s administration, has stepped down as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden. To put it in perspective, after more than five decades of distinguished and controversial government service, his legacy will be bittersweet — not quite the hero his supporters lionize or the villain his detractors portray.
Judged by his medical record alone, Fauci is in the top echelon of American physicians. He did groundbreaking work in immunology and helped develop lifesaving drugs for serious rheumatologic diseases. He discovered how to re-dose certain cancer drugs, turning a 98% mortality rate for one disease into a 93% remission rate. His honors include a Lasker Award, the highest award in biomedical science other than the Nobel Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, given to him by President George W. Bush in 2008.
But there is more to the story. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed, “There are no second acts in American life,” but Fauci did have a second act when he switched specialties from immunology to infectious diseases just before HIV/AIDS began to sweep the world. By virtue of his government position, Fauci became the U.S. point person for the global HIV epidemic.
