Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the federal government’s Covid response as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), is set to join Georgetown University in July as a distinguished professor.
The appointment represents “Georgetown’s highest professional honor that recognizes extraordinary achievement in scholarship, teaching and service,” the university noted in a statement.
Fauci, who recently advised Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden before resigning his post in 2022, welcomed the news. “I ask myself, now, at this stage in my life, what do I have to offer to society?” the doctor said in a statement published by Georgetown. “I could do more experiments in the lab and have my lab going, but given what I’ve been through, I think what I have to offer is experience and inspiration to the younger generation of students.”
“This is a natural extension of my scientific, clinical and public health career, which was initially grounded from my high school and college days where I was exposed to intellectual rigor, integrity and service-mindedness of Jesuit institutions,” Fauci added.
Fauci served as a prominent public-health expert for more than five decades, playing a leading role in helping America navigate the defining health crises of our times. During the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, he helped pioneer a program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which delivered treatments to more than 20 million people.
However, it was Fauci’s work during the pandemic which catapulted the scientist into the public eye, making him a celebrity in some circles and a reviled figure in others. Speaking with 60 Minutes in March 2020, Fauci downplayed the importance of face masks to prevent infection before going on to ultimately endorse stringent mask mandates, including for young children.
“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face,” Fauci said at the time.
Later that year, in December, Fauci gave an interview to the New York Times in which he admitted that intentionally misled the American public about the efficacy of masks in order to preserve the nation’s limited supply for doctors.
“In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks,” the Times reported.
Testifying on Capitol Hill in May 2021, Fauci gave evasive answers about whether American taxpayers had contributed funding to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and whether he had a hand in it. Despite growing evidence that Covid-19 may have emerged from the lab, Fauci consistently dismissed such views as “just conspiracy theories.”