Despite leaving government, Anthony Fauci ain’t going anywhere

Old habits die hard, especially for the outgoing head of President Biden’s COVID-19 task force, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

As you may have heard, the 81-year-old announced last week that he will be stepping down from his role in the administration and as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Next stop: Tony Fauci, private citizen. But save this column for early 2023: Because it is virtually guaranteed that Fauci will not forfeit his greatest love and habit: Appearing on camera.

Since the coronavirus hit the United States in early 2020, Fauci has conducted hundreds upon hundreds of interviews. He originally was seen as a necessary voice to educate the public about what COVID-19 is and how to best protect ourselves from it, and rightly so given his resume on infectious diseases. But Fauci quickly became overexposed in ways that had little to do with the virus, but about the man himself.

InStyle magazine, for example, featured Fauci on its cover, not in a lab coat, but lounging by his pool. Headline: “Dr. Fauci says, ‘With all due modesty, I think I’m pretty effective.’”

Fauci also posed for magazine covers for People, Time and The Washingtonian, among others. The Guardian dubbed him “The Sexiest Man Alive.” And Brad Pitt scored an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of a sexy Fauci on Saturday Night Live.

NBC National Affairs analyst John Heilemann even went so far as to argue that Republicans intentionally wanted COVID to stay around, which is why many are critical of Fauci.

“If people follow Fauci, there’s a likelier chance that COVID will go away. And if COVID goes away it’s bad right now for Republicans,” Heilemann once said, “It’s just the math on this — the political math is not hard to figure out.”

In retrospect, a turning point for some in their perception of Fauci came in July 2020. The Major League Baseball season was finally underway in Washington after being delayed for almost four months when the Nationals hosted the New York Yankees. Fauci was chosen to throw out the first pitch and stayed to watch the game in a near-empty stadium.

Then a photo emerged that quickly went viral: Fauci, smiling and chatting with two other people without wearing a mask over his nose and mouth, a precaution he insisted was needed in public settings, especially for older Americans, who may be more susceptible to the virus, and especially at a time when no vaccine was available.

Fauci was confronted about this apparent hypocrisy but claimed he was drinking water at the time and lowered his mask for just a moment. He called the criticism “mischievous.”

But the photo showed him with two hands on his phone and not on a bottle of water. The right thing for Fauci to say at the time was that he should have been more careful and should follow his own rules. That never happened. 

But as we would learn, Fauci is much like Donald Trump: He almost never admits a mistake.

From there, the distrust continued to grow as the pandemic wore on during an election year. In April 2020, Fauci had publicly bucked President Trump’s claim that a vaccine could be available before the end of 2020, instead predicting its availability more likely in the later stages of 2021. (The first jabs of the vaccine were administered in December 2020.)

Fauci also flip-flopped on mask wearing itself by first recommending that they weren’t needed as the pandemic came, before recommending them and even going so far as to advise double-masking as the best way to go late in 2020. He also once wrote that the kind of masks that the average citizen would buy in a store was not “really effective” in preventing infection.

“The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material,” Fauci said in a February 2020 email.

And then there were the confrontations on Capitol Hill with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) over the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) funding for gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Technology, which is located in the same city where the novel coronavirus originated. Fauci, to this day, says it’s almost impossible for COVID-19 to have originated in a lab despite growing evidence to the contrary.

“Anyone that knows even a little bit about virology will tell you that it would be molecularly impossible for those viruses to have turned into, either accidentally or deliberately, SARS-COVID-2,” Fauci told Fox News Channel anchor Neil Cavuto recently. “People seem to disregard that and go on with a wide variety of conspiracy theories.”

Republicans promise hearings starring Fauci on Capitol Hill if they take back the House of Representatives. Fauci says his retirement isn’t timed to avoid them and plans to willingly appear.

So in addition to what promises to be highly watched hearings if the GOP takes back the House, there is also Fauci’s tendency to almost never say “no” to an interview request. And as a contributor on cable or broadcast news, Fauci would undoubtedly be featured more than most.

As to where he ends up, the best bet is MSNBC. As Freud said, there is no such thing as an accident, and it’s certainly no accident that Fauci ran to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow for an exclusive and fawning interview on the same day the retirement was announced earlier this month.

“Thank you for a lifetime, so far, of service,” Maddow told Fauci last week. “I can’t wait to see what you do next.”

Oh, it’s fairly certain what Fauci will do next: Appear on the air — often. 

Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist.