Coronavirus booster shots covering BA.5 may be little more than a month off, but Dr. Anthony Fauci says his retirement is far more distant.
Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, gave the positive diagnosis of the vaccine development — and his own professional longevity — this week as COVID hospital admissions climbed, driven by the new viral variant.
BA.5, the ultra-contagious and now-dominant omicron COVID subvariant, has been charging across America throughout the summer. In New York City, test positivity rates have stayed in double digits for more than a month, according to city data, and death rates have increased, if only minimally.
“When you have more infections, just quantitatively, you’re going to ultimately see more hospitalizations and more deaths,” Fauci said. “That doesn’t mean necessarily that BA.5 is any more virulent or deadly.”
Fauci, who got caught in the wave last month, testing positive for his first time in the pandemic, said he is concerned about stubbornly low booster shot rates. An added incentive could be approaching for Americans.
The 81-year-old doctor said the primary companies supplying vaccines in America — Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech — could begin distributing doses of bivalent boosters covering BA.5 as summer fades to fall.
“That is what we’re hearing from the companies: that they will likely have doses available to go into people’s arms with the updated variant-specific bivalent by September,” said Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Federal health officials have stressed that the current shots save lives, and urged every American age 50 or older to get a fresh shot if they have not this year.
The White House promised this month that a new jab will not prevent a boost with enhanced protection in the fall. Still, almost 30% of Americans who have reached age 65 have not received a single COVID booster shot, according to federal figures.
“People just so much want to get the pandemic behind them that they’re saying, ‘I’m done with this, I don’t really want to have any more to do with it,’” Fauci said. “Which is an understandable feeling, but the virus doesn’t feel that way. The virus continues to afflict us.”
The U.S. has never managed to drive its daily COVID death rate below 200 since it reached the mark in late March 2020, according to weeklong tallies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And Fauci has all but given up predicting when COVID will be reduced to a past threat.
But he made waves recently with news that he expected to leave his government post by 2025. A Politico story said that Fauci was “facing retirement,” a notion that the Brooklyn, New York-born physician bristled at.
“The Politico article, I think, skewed the reality — they made a headline that I’m retiring,” Fauci told the Daily News. “I was asked: Would I stay on if there were a Republican president, like Donald Trump, in January 2025? And I said, very honestly, that it doesn’t really matter who is president in January 2025, whether it’s Donald Trump or another Republican, or whether it’s the second term of President Biden.
“I would probably leave government service and pursue other professional pursuits,” Fauci added. “Sometime between now and January 2025, I will step down.”
But Fauci, who has served under seven presidents, and as a top COVID adviser to Trump and Biden, said he is not sure when he will leave the government, or what will come next.
“I have not yet decided,” he said. “That’s the core truth.”
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