SUCCESSION PLAN – Fifty-four years in government – including 38 years leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. An adviser to seven presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The face of the US government’s response to Covid.
We may never see the likes of Anthony Fauci again. and not only because of his outstanding achievements. The departure of Fauci, who announced today that he will step down in December from his three jobs as director of NIAID, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and head of an immunology laboratory at the National Institutes of Health, will cause a ” tectonic shift” at NIAID, where his successor will face a politically charged environment unlike any we knew before Covid.
Fauci played a tremendous role in building and establishing an operation that can quickly respond to new, evolving threats — from AIDS to H1N1 to Zika and Ebola, Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. . But by the end of his tenure, Fauci was a staple of Republican campaign ads — a pandemic-era hero to many Democrats, but a pretentious and overbearing bureaucrat to many on the right.
Public health policy, now as polarized as elsewhere in government, will require careful consideration of how Fauci’s broad responsibilities should be met.
“I know Tony quite well. I have no idea what his politics are. Reagan and both Bushes liked him. Clinton and Obama loved it,” Tom Frieden, former director and president of the CDC and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, a global public health initiative, told Nightly. “The country has just become so hyperpartisan that the space for someone who is non-partisan is very little.”
It’s likely we’ll never see another figure like Fauci juggle three roles and navigate the nexus of science and politics in such a public-facing way, said former surgeon general Jerome Adams. .
In Adams’ view, the next Fauci will be a team of people: Someone to advise the president, someone to run NIAID, and someone to run the immunology lab. This division of responsibilities is more important than ever in today’s political environment, he said.
“I can tell you that I, and most of my former and current colleagues, feel the real harm that has come from us stepping into these roles where we were seen as part of an administration at a very volatile time. politically,” Adams said. . “And it was reflected in the institutions that we represented — it was reflected in the CDC, and in the NIH, and it was reflected in the Office of the Surgeon General in ways that were unfortunate, that none of us wanted or expected.”
It’s still important for White House officials to have trusted experts they can lean on for advice as new crises arise, Frieden said. But in his experience, while it’s tempting to create “transverse positions,” it’s more organizationally comfortable when agency experts stay within their own lanes. The way Fauci’s role evolved, given his decades of experience, he was eventually named the scientific lead for Covid — a much larger role than would normally be expected of an NIAID head.
“In my experience, the best [practice] is to strengthen the lines, basically, to make sure that the agencies that are supposed to do their jobs do their jobs well,” Frieden said. “If you want a chief science adviser, that’s somebody within the Office of Science and Technology Policy for the president. If you want a top adviser on public health outbreak control, that’s the relevant specialist at the CDC. If you want someone to lead infectious disease research, that’s the head of NIAID.”
It made sense at the time to use Fauci’s diverse talents—as a scientist, communicator, and respected adviser. But as Fauci moves into his next post-government chapter, Adams said, it will be helpful to allow the next head of NIAID to maintain a degree of anonymity to the public, as Fauci once had before the pandemic, and to have people like Ashish. Jha, the White House’s Covid response coordinator, takes on the political communications role ahead.
Adams sees this as a chance to improve the flow of information from government agencies to both the public and the White House.
“We want people to know who these people are and respect them in times of crisis, but we don’t want them to be in the news every time. [Kentucky GOP senator and harsh Fauci critic] Rand Paul decides he’s fed up with the administration,” Adams said.
What keeps the former surgeon general up at night is his fear that talented candidates will not want these jobs after what Fauci and other public health officials have faced in recent years. Fauci has received death threats and his daughters have been harassed — and Adams worries that this vitriol is a big part of why Fauci is leaving.
Even today, after Fauci’s announcement, GOP lawmakers said his retirement would not stop them from calling him on the Hill for an inquiry into the government’s pandemic response if they retake Congress.
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EVACUATION ORDER – Ludmila Bohomolova and her husband Mykola know what it means to stay back after the Russian tanks roll in. The two teachers endured what they describe as five months of hell after their village of Pavlivka in eastern Ukraine was invaded earlier this year, Lily writes. Hyde.
Unable to provide security or essential services to nearly 750,000 people in areas where the fighting is fiercest, the Ukrainian government now insists they must move elsewhere in the country. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, however, framed the evacuation order not as a demand for people to leave their homes, but as the right of citizens to be provided with safe transportation, financial assistance and shelter in safer areas.
Under criticism from humanitarian organizations that it has not done enough to protect civilians in combat zones, Kiev is undertaking what Vereshchuk has described as “the largest movement of people in the history of the independent Ukrainian state”.
More than 12 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the war, most of them internally. The government says it expects another 220,000 to be evacuated from the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine before winter. Vereshchuk, who is also minister for the reintegration of temporarily occupied territories, says the evacuation order will extend to another 500,000 people in Russian-occupied or at-risk areas in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv regions.
OUT OF TOWN — New York City Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t want reporters asking too many questions about his after-hours habits — lest the people he meets there get invited, writes Julian Shen-Mud.
A self-described “nightlife mayor,” Adams has been known for wining and dining at fancy restaurants and exclusive clubs like the members-only Zero Bond and high-end Midtown restaurant Osteria La Baia. Today, he condemned a report linking La Baia to two of his friends who were convicted of crimes in 2014 — a connection first reported by POLITICO.
The deals have raised questions about who the mayor spends his private time with and whether he is receiving gifts that should be reported in political disclosures. Adams, who earns a salary of more than $250,000 as mayor, said he picks up the dinner plates himself.
“I pay every bill, not the city. … Which mayor have you ever asked to get receipts for his private dinners?” he said, refusing to provide proof he was paying. He also declined to identify who gives him access to exclusive clubs like Zero Bond, where a membership costs $4,000 a year.
“If I tell you who I go with, you’ll all be doing four-page stories about them,” he said. “No one will want to hang out with me anymore.”
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