Dr Anthony Fauci, United States top infectious disease expert announced that he will depart from the federal government in December.
Anthony Fauci, controversial US top-doc and Biden’s advisor, to retire by year-end
Dr Anthony Fauci, United States top infectious disease expert who became a household name during the COVID-19 pandemic, announced that he will depart from the federal government in December. In service for more than five decades, the chief medical advisor of US President Joe Biden has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation. He was a leader in the federal response to HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases even before the Coronavirus hit.
I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career,” Fauci said in a statement, calling those roles “the honour of a lifetime
Fauci & COVID: Wuhan mystery & leaked emails
‘He has touched all Americans’ lives with his work,”- Biden said in a few words for Dr Fauci, who made headlines not just in the US daily but across the world post-March 2020. The role of NIAID, headed by Dr Fauci, was questioned for connection with labs in Wuhan that allegedly carried out research on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Multiple reports had claimed that Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers had been conducting experiments since 2016 which involved RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as the closest sample to the virus.
Rekindling the debate on the origin of the Coronavirus pandemic and the underlying COVID-19 virus, noted science writer and author Nicholas Wade in May 2021, shared his take on whether the NIAID which has been helmed by Dr Anthony Fauci since 1984, funded research into the Coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Wade’s self-published two scientific articles re-ignited the discourse on whether the deadly virus was developed in a lab or whether it was naturally transmitted to humans from bats, as claimed thus far.
Speaking exclusively to Republic TV, Wade claimed that the NIAID possibly had knowledge of what was being researched in the Wuhan Institute of Virology as it had funded two separate tranches of grants to further research of Coronavirus. The Wuhan lab has long been thought to be a potential place of origin for the virus, if not the wet market where the other ‘natural transfer’ theory pegs it first infected humans.
In May 2021, Anthony Fauci said that he was ‘not convinced’ if the virus developed naturally, and batted for the investigation to continue until it is found out to the best of the world’s abilities on ‘what actually happened’. This was in sharp contrast to the statements made by him since the COVID-19 breakout in March 2020, in which he suggested that the virus ‘developed organically’.
Months thereafter, to everyone’s surprise, several media outlets in the US released thousands of emails sent and received by Fauci when the Coronavirus infection was just on the rise. In one such email, an executive at EcoHealth which funded research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology into the COVID-19 origin thanked Dr. Fauci for publicly stating that scientific evidence supports a ‘natural origin’ for the Coronavirus and not a lab leak.
However, the White House medical adviser labelled it as “nonsense” and stressed that he has been “open-minded” about the origin of COVID.
