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BETHESDA, Md. — The mural of Anthony S. Fauci hung in the halls of the National Institutes of Health, greeting passersby with an inspirational quote from the retired federal official.
"Science is telling us that we can do phenomenal things if we put our minds and our resources to it," read the message from Fauci, who ended his five-decade career at the agency in December 2022.
Now there is no image of Fauci, no inspirational message - just a discolored, empty patch of wall. The portrait and quote, which welcomed NIH leaders and staff in one of the campus's central buildings, was cut out of the mural in the first weeks of the Trump administration, said three current NIH staffers, who provided photos to The Washington Post.
NIH didn't respond to questions about the agency's relationship with its most prominent alumnus, including why the mural depicting him was removed. But it is of a piece with other recent actions that the new Trump administration has taken toward the longtime infectious-disease expert, five years after President Donald Trump announced covid-related shutdowns that he and his advisers have since blamed on guidance from Fauci. Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur behind the U.S. DOGE Service, in November called Fauci "a freaking demon," alleging that the retired federal scientist indirectly funded risky virus research in China that sparked the pandemic. Fauci and his colleagues have repeatedly denied the claim, and there is no evidence SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic, was in any laboratory before the outbreak.
The ongoing focus on Fauci also comes during broader pressures on NIH, a nearly $50 billion scientific agency that has been largely paralyzed under the Trump administration. Federal research funding has slowed to a trickle, prompting universities to freeze ongoing work and rescind offers of employment. Grants for vaccine-hesitancy studies and other work have been canceled. Current and former NIH officials say they are alarmed, and politicians in both parties have said they're worried about the implications.
"It's a profound threat to scientific progress in America," said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), who spoke at a rally outside NIH last weekend. "This is the jewel of the scientific establishment … and Elon Musk and DOGE have brought their slash-and-burn tactics right to its doorstep."
Raskin also castigated efforts to minimize the work of Fauci, the highest-profile government scientist in recent years. DOGE canceled a long-planned NIH exhibit to honor the 84-year-old doctor's career, with Musk touting the cost savings in a social media post. The exhibit was largely complete, said several current and former NIH officials, who suggested the savings would be minimal at best. NIH also withdrew an invitation to have Fauci speak on campus this month as part of an NIH Grand Rounds series, Fauci told The Post.
"This is the kind of treatment that scientists get in totalitarian societies like Stalinist Russia if they don't toe the political line of the leaders," Raskin said.
Megan Ranney, dean of Yale University's public health school, said Fauci's career had been defined by efforts to improve human health and engage with his critics, such as the HIV activists who confronted Fauci in the 1980s and later became his champions.
"Did he make mistakes during covid? Absolutely - everyone did," Ranney said. "We can and should engage in real inquiry about what went well and what didn't … erasing someone is not a productive solution."
The White House defended its approach to NIH, saying that its changes to the agency's funding model were intended to steer more money toward science and away from administrative costs, and criticized Fauci's record.
"Americans are no longer interested in blind faith adherence to demonstrably fallible ‘experts' like Anthony Fauci," spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. "The Trump administration will continue to restore transparency, accountability, and confidence in our healthcare apparatus to Make America Healthy Again while being a good steward of taxpayer dollars."
Fauci rose to global prominence during the covid-19 pandemic, providing guidance to two presidential administrations - and reassurance to a nervous public that initially hailed his briefings and media appearances. Universities and other organizations bestowed honors on him, saying that Fauci's long career of fighting HIV/AIDS, covid and other infectious diseases made him a symbol for public health.
"His beyond impressive medical and scientific accomplishments have been too often reduced to political crossfire," David Perlmutter, the dean of the medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, said at the school's 2023 commencement, calling Fauci the "ultimate model of what can be achieved by the career of a physician-scientist."
But Fauci's high profile proved to be two-sided as backlash to the nation's covid response steadily grew. Republicans such as Sen. Rand Paul (Kentucky) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed to investigate and potentially prosecute Fauci for his pandemic guidance or for his agency's funding of risky virus research. Other Americans grew frustrated with school shutdowns and other pandemic-era policies that remained in place for months or even years, sometimes with little evidence to support their implementation - and amid mounting evidence of learning loss. Fauci himself acknowledged missteps as new data emerged.
"It was a pretty quick honeymoon period at the beginning of the pandemic, where we had some unity and trust in our national institutions on health," said Liz Hamel, a vice president and director of public opinion and survey research at KFF, a nonpartisan health-care think tank.
Hamel cited KFF findings that public trust in Fauci steadily declined, driven by a partisan split. Roughly 8 in 10 Republicans and Democrats said they trusted Fauci in April 2020, near the start of the pandemic; two years later, only 25 percent of Republicans said they trusted Fauci, while 86 percent of Democrats said they did.
Outgoing President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci in one of his final acts in office this year, with the former president and Fauci both saying that he had committed no crime but faced threats from the incoming administration.
Meanwhile, critics of Fauci have risen to power across the government and particularly at NIH. The Trump administration in January tapped Matthew J. Memoli, a mid-level flu researcher at NIH, to serve as the acting head of the biomedical agency, bypassing dozens of other officials; Memoli had publicly criticized Fauci in 2021, making him a pariah within NIH leadership but winning him fans outside of it. Memoli said that Fauci's push to mandate coronavirus vaccines was unethical and inappropriate, particularly because the vaccines were unable to stop transmission of the virus.
"He has been behaving exactly as I was taught not to behave as a physician in medical school, a judgmental, paternalistic and aloof physician," Memoli wrote to a colleague in October 2021 in an email released under the Freedom of Information Act.
Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford academic and trained physician who co-wrote the October 2020 Great Barrington Declaration - a letter that criticized the federal coronavirus response and called for rolling back broad shutdowns - also blamed Fauci and his NIH colleagues for attempts to suppress that letter and broader dissent. Those efforts inadvertently helped raise Bhattacharya's profile and have put him on the verge of being confirmed as NIH's new leader.
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), a physician who served on a GOP-led coronavirus oversight panel that wrapped its work in December, said that the panel's review left her critical of Fauci and NIH leadership.
"The final [panel] report details how readily apparent both Dr. Fauci and the NIH were suppressing covid origins and actively suppressing contrary opinions (lab leak theories) on social media platforms," Miller-Meeks said in a statement.
In an email, Fauci defended his disclosures, saying that he had been forthright about the possibility of a laboratory leak. He pointed to an email sent in early 2020, where Fauci discussed the need to alert authorities if scientists uncovered evidence that the virus had been man-made.
"It is inconceivable to me that anyone can read that email and conclude that I was trying to cover up anything," Fauci wrote. He also said that he never tried to suppress Bhattacharya's work, which was widely criticized by public health groups that warned rolling back coronavirus protections would put vulnerable people at risk.
"There is a difference between suppressing someone's work and disagreeing with it," Fauci wrote. "I disagree with the premise of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). I find it to be conceptually and practically flawed."
Fauci said that he has continued to retain a private security detail because he is still facing credible threats that began during the pandemic. Trump in January ended Fauci's government-provided security detail after nearly five years, saying that former government officials should not expect security for the rest of their lives.
Trump's return also has ushered in a new environment for Fauci and his allies.
Some scientists, physicians and other experts who previously spoke up to defend Fauci demurred when approached this month by The Post. One physician who publicly called Fauci a "hero" two years ago wrote in an email that his views had not changed - but the political climate had, prompting his request for anonymity to speak on Fauci again. Others said they were worried of drawing scrutiny from the Trump administration at a moment when NIH funding has been imperiled.
Leaders of some universities that honored Fauci with awards and speaking invitations during the height of the pandemic, such as Michigan State and Washington University in St. Louis, did not respond to requests for comment.
Others have called for a reexamination of Fauci and the broader role of public health experts.
"I don't have a positive view of Fauci's role during the pandemic," said Frances Lee, a Princeton University political scientist who co-wrote a new book, "In Covid's Wake," that revisits decisions made during the crisis.
In an interview, Lee cited examples of Fauci shifting his position on the value of masking, on the utility of vaccines to stop virus transmission and other matters that she said contributed to a mistrust in government officials, with long-lasting consequences. Lee pointed to the decision to elevate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, to the role of the nation's health secretary, saying that Kennedy benefited from supporters' sense "that the full truth was not being told to them on a variety of issues" during the pandemic.
Public health experts have said that it is easy to second-guess Fauci's guidance and some of the harshest aspects of the covid response today, a view that some have called "pandemic revisionism" because it can discount the uncertainty and fear as a new virus spread.
"I think it's important to remember that we did not have anything to offer people," said Caitlin Rivers, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist and author of "Crisis Averted," which reviews public health interventions. "We had no vaccines and no treatments, and no clear timeline of when they would become available. Hospitals were overwhelmed in many places. And the impacts were profound - over a million Americans died."
Regardless of the cause, there is now a notable divide in views on Fauci between Democrats, who continue to admire him, and among Republicans, where he is scorned. The split evokes similar differences in trust for public health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hamel, the KFF pollster, called the division "troubling."
"In the event of another health crisis - if bird flu or measles were to worsen into something even close to what the covid pandemic was like - I think it will be really difficult for public health officials to convince some people to take actions and behaviors that may be necessary to protect their own health or protect other people's health," she said.
Meanwhile, on the NIH campus, some staff told The Post that they continued to look to Fauci as an example. One shared a photo of a printout of Fauci's portrait - the same image that had been removed from the mural - that had been posted on a wall with a different Fauci quote: "Keep pushing."