Will Biden and Fauci consider leaving before 2025?
Summary
Two lords of the lockdown era may be overstaying their political welcome.One shuttered the country and the other campaigned as a shut-in. Two Beltway lifers who promoted the disastrous lockdown policies of the Covid era seem to be on their way out of Washington. And even left-leaning media folk seem ready to see them depart.
The news that Dr. Anthony Fauci will finally end his long tenure running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is oddly being delivered along with a suggestion that President Joe Biden is also a short-timer.
“Fauci says he will retire from government post by the end of Biden’s term," is the headline on a Washington Post story. Yasmeen Abutaleb writes:
Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s preeminent infectious-diseases expert who has served as the face of the coronavirus pandemic response for more than two years, will retire by the end of President Biden’s term after more than 50 years in government, he confirmed Monday to The Washington Post.
“By the time we get to the end of the Biden administration term, I feel it would be time for me to step down from this position," Fauci said.
Fauci’s decision to retire by 2025 was first reported by Politico.
Politico’s Sarah Owermohle earlier reported the news in a way that also suggested Mr. Biden is a one-termer:
The most famous scientist in America is facing retirement.
After more than five decades of federal service under seven presidents, Anthony Fauci says he’s leaving by the end of President Joe Biden’s term. In a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO, he spoke of his legacy, the hard truths about the country’s pandemic response and his desire to calm the politicization wracking the country.
“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," Biden’s chief medical adviser said when asked whether he is staying in his role out of a sense of obligation.
He’s not. But his assessment, that we’ll live with Covid-19 for many years to come, is a startling admission from the longtime infectious disease expert who said the country could flatten the curve and achieve herd immunity, first through social distancing and then vaccination.
If Dr. Fauci lives to be 105 he will likely never be able to undo the damage that Covid policies inflicted on America’s children. He promoted shutdown policies that isolated them from friends, opportunities and care, saddled them with trillions of dollars in federal debt and—due to degraded education—reduced their future earnings. He never could have sold lockdowns in 2020 if he had said then what’s he’s saying today about the long-term presence of Covid.
Even in the spring of 2020 there was ample reason to question the wisdom of lockdowns, and many of us did. There was ample evidence that kids faced little risk from Covid and that schools would not be the superspreaders of media lore. There was also ample reason to focus on protecting the vulnerable rather than turning society upside down. Dr. Fauci’s endorsement of school closures while freely acknowledging he did not have a thorough understanding of the harms should be a lesson in schools of public health on the need to avoid panicked responses to future viruses.
This column will go out on a limb and predict that if Republicans take one or both houses of Congress this fall—gaining oversight authority and subpoena power—Dr. Fauci will be leaving long before Jan. 20, 2025.
As for the president, one can’t help but also wonder how long he will want to stay on the job. Last week on the FiveThirtyEight website, Geoffrey Skelley noted a grim political milestone for the White House:
... Biden is dancing with a bleak bit of history: His approval rating of 39 percent is now the worst of any elected president at this point in his presidency since the end of World War II, according to FiveThirtyEight’s historical presidential approval data. In other words, Biden is arguably in worse shape than any other elected president heading into his first midterm election, including his four most recent predecessors, who, like Biden, were operating in an increasingly polarized political climate.
Forget partisan polarization. Even within the Democratic coalition, people keep suggesting that the President is not going to be re-elected. Reporting Friday on the failure of the President’s effort to enact new climate spending and tax hikes, Jim Tankersley, Lisa Friedman and Coral Davenport wrote in the New York Times:
The death of the legislation is just the latest, but arguably worst, blow to Mr. Biden’s climate agenda, as his tools to tackle global warming have been stripped, one by one.
“There has been a party leadership-wide failure to address this," said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group that represents many young climate activists.
“I want to make sure Biden and his administration hear this loud and clear," Ms. Prakash said. “They have to create a response across all agencies of the government at every level over the course of the two and a half years that they remain in office to do everything in their power to address the climate crisis, or risk being a huge failure and disappointment to the American people and young people in particular."
If even Democrats are reaching a consensus that Mr. Biden should vacate his office in January of 2025, why would he want to stay that long?
