Several months after the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci shared an observation that proved to be oddly prescient. Speaking before the Aspen Ideas Festival, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases pointed out that "there is a general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling among some people in this country — an alarmingly large percentage of people, relatively speaking."
Two years have passed since Fauci uttered those remarks. Now Fauci has announced that — after a career spanning back to the 1980s and including service under seven presidents — he is going to retire. Few physicians in the United States become household names; fewer still are remembered by historians, whether for positive or negative reasons. Regardless of one's opinion of the headline-making public health official, "Anthony Fauci" is a name that will be uttered for centuries by future historians of United States politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
