Dr. Anthony Fauci looks back on career, COVID and controversy

Dr. Anthony Fauci, preparing to end his high-profile run as chief White House medical adviser, says he is proud of his legacy but laments the vicious political climate surrounding the COVID pandemic.

“I just want people to know that I gave it everything I had and didn’t leave anything on the field. I was all there,” Fauci, 81, said in an interview at his Washington, D.C. home that ran Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

“It’s been an amazing journey that all of us have been through and still are in actually,” he added.

Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became a familiar face worldwide as COVID emerged in late 2019. The virus has taken more than 1 million lives in the U.S. alone.

“I have been driving onto that campus every single day, every single weekend for the last 54 years,” he said. “So I don’t even want to think about what it’s going to be like when I drive off the campus for the last time … That idea just gives me chills just thinking about that.”

Over the summer, Fauci announced his plans to step down in December.

Many Americans considered Fauci a voice of reason amid the chaos of former President Donald Trump’s handling of the outbreak. Numerous Republican leaders and their followers, meanwhile, vilified him over COVID safety measures like mask mandates and business and school closings.

Fauci said the timing of the outbreak made things much worse than they might otherwise have been.

“It got political very, very quickly because we had the misfortune of an outbreak and a double misfortune of an outbreak in a divided society and the triple misfortune of a divided society in an election year,” he said. “It was a triple whammy.”

But he praised the Trump administration for its efforts to quickly develop a COVID vaccine, known as Operation Warp Speed.

“The former administration should be very proud of that,” Fauci said. “Just as [Trump] takes the blame for things in the administration, he should take the credit for things in the administration. That was a positive thing, Operation Warp Speed.”

He bemoaned the notorious April 2020 news conference in which Trump suggested injecting disinfectant to beat COVID.

Fauci said he excused himself once he got “a bad feeling” during a Homeland Security official’s briefing ahead of the presser.

“As soon as I heard it, I said, holy s–t, this is going to go bad. Why don’t I bow out of this one?”

If he had been there, Fauci said he would have made a “time-out” gesture when Trump started rambling about disinfectant.

Even as Fauci leaves his posts, Republican lawmakers have vowed to investigate the country’s COVID response and ask him to testify if they win back Congress in this year’s midterm elections.

Fauci, who repeatedly appeared before Congress during the pandemic, told ABC News that he would be fine with testifying again.