Few others cast a shadow as long as Fauci – who last year gave the United States an intensive course in epidemiology – especially with the main vacant health posts. Vivek Murthy, one of Biden’s favorite advisers during the transition and nominated as a general surgeon, is awaiting confirmation from the Senate, as is Xavier Becerra, chosen by Biden to head the Department of Health and Human Services. The government has not appointed a candidate to head the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees medicines and vaccines.
Meanwhile, Fauci’s rise from his long standing post at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he left younger health workers, like Walensky, trying to catch up. While she and other health experts are included in conversations with the president about the state of the pandemic, Fauci often takes the lead – addressing the CDC director for details on topics such as testing or genetic sequencing of virus variants, according to o three people familiar with the meetings.
The White House declined to comment on this story. But Fauci insists that his regular conversations with Biden are simply a product of being in Washington DC, while other senior advisers are dispersed across the country during the pandemic. The CDC is based in Atlanta, and most consultants still use Zoom for Oval instructions, said Fauci. “It’s not that there is anything special about me.”
Being close to the White House and in its corridors has its benefits. Fauci had long conversations with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris that few had in the early days of the government. Before a vaccination event at the White House, Fauci spent an hour and a half with Biden and Harris, casually discussing vaccine priorities, about coronavirus strains and when Americans could return to business normally.
Biden also turned to Fauci for advice on who to appoint to senior positions and senior roles in health agencies. In a recent interview with POLITICO, the scientist said he strongly advocated that Walensky be appointed as director of the CDC.
The president’s go-to-Fauci attitude flourished during the transition in November. Biden’s team was still trying to figure out what kind of response to the pandemic it would inherit in January. Fauci feared that new infections, hospitalizations and deaths – already increasing after Thanksgiving – would increase even more after the December holidays, and that Americans would hesitate to get vaccinated.
Biden’s team sought Fauci’s guidance, said an individual who worked with the transition team and two current senior officials. The director of NIAID offered the new government a reality check: Biden would likely take office during a perfect storm. Holiday-related cases and deaths were likely to peak in mid-January and the vaccine’s release would be slow.
It was at that time, the sources said, that Biden decided that he wanted Fauci to take a greater role in his administration – to give him access to the Oval and to allow him to guide the federal government’s response.
It is “a totally different interaction” with the new administration, Fauci told POLITICO, describing daily meetings with the Covid-19 task force led by Jeff Zients and weekly formal briefings for Biden. “The contrast is quite dramatic, as the president is spending a considerable amount of his time dealing with this outbreak … He talks freely with us.”
Fauci, who in nearly 40 years as a NIAID leader has guided the U.S. response to outbreaks ranging from HIV to Ebola, played a central role in the Trump administration’s initial Covid-19 response. But as the president’s term drew to a close, the scientist was often sidelined by a White House eager to show progress against the pandemic and promise a return to normal.
The feud between the pair began when Fauci openly contradicted Trump during press conferences, when Trump promised stellar results from unproven vaccines or predicted that vaccines were weeks away from being authorized, ignoring the requirements that his administration had set for clinical testing. .
“I felt compelled to correct that,” said Fauci. “Now, the best way to correct it would be backstage, talking to him and his team. But when you’re there on the podium in front of an international audience at a press conference, sometimes you just have to come up and say, ‘No, I’m sorry, that’s not the case.’ “
Despite the turmoil, Fauci remained a familiar presence in the media and a trusted voice in the pandemic. Biden’s transition team turned to him in late 2020 to distill confusing vaccine distribution plans and reopening strategies devised under Trump. The public, meanwhile, produced Fauci memorabilia from bobbleheads to themed cocktails and clothing.
At that time, Fauci had not spoken directly to Trump in weeks.
Biden has yet to appear during one of the White House’s Covid-19 press conferences, which typically include a mix of Fauci, Zients, Walensky, White House senior Covid-19 consultant Andy Slavitt and manager of the stock task force, Marcella Nunez-Smith. The president receives regular weekly briefings from the task force while members speak “several times a day” every day, and Zients is in “constant contact” with White House chief of staff Ron Klain, Fauci said.
For the most part, Fauci says the Biden White House gives him the ability to speak freely, often and without first informing White House officials. But the president’s medical director works with the White House communications team, for example, to prepare for television interviews on the weekends.
The longtime veteran’s rise back to the president’s good graces and frequent visits to the Oval Office are noticeable, mainly because Biden shapes his message about the reopening of the United States and the vaccination of millions of people.
More recently, for example, Fauci has been instrumental in the government’s rejection of growing calls for Americans to postpone second doses of the vaccine in favor of giving more people their initial vaccines more quickly.
Several lawmakers and health experts have asked the White House to allow the postponement of second doses, amid evidence suggesting that people are largely protected from Covid after a single injection of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. And at least two of the former members of the Biden Covid advisory board – Zeke Emanuel, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania and a former Obama aide, and epidemiologist Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota – have directly appealed to government officials to seriously consider the idea.
But Fauci was firmly opposed to the idea in public and private for weeks due to concerns that the data was not yet convincing enough, reinforcing concerns more widely within the government that changing the recommendations now would be a logistical and messaging nightmare.
“We’ve been talking for some time about why we feel strongly that we need to follow science,” said Fauci during the White House Covid-19 briefing on Wednesday, adding that a single shot “may be good enough to get a degree. . protection, but we don’t know how long it will last. “
Fauci also suggested in recent conversations that the guidelines for vaccinated people – that is, if they need to wear masks – may change as more data is released, suggesting that he will continue to be involved in the CDC guidance discussion.
“I don’t know if I agree with all the judgments Tony makes, but if I had to choose a horse that really had common sense and you said: ‘You need someone to drive this car, whoever you want’ he would be the person”, said Emanuel. “He saw HIV, he saw Zika, he saw Ebola. He has more experience. He is a person who has demonstrated that he can learn and grow. ”