his role as director of the NIAID, to serve as the chief medical advisor to the president in the Biden administration. Fauci accepted the offer. After the inauguration of Joe Biden in January 2021, Fauci said he experienced a "liberating feeling" in being able to speak freely about science without interference from the new administration. He pictured Biden's administration as committed to being "completely transparent, open and honest". Fauci was involved in the development of the Biden administration's plan for a nationwide COVID-19 vaccine rollout. In early April 2021, Fauci said of the current situation in the United States that "It's almost a race between getting people vaccinated and this surge that seems to want to increase". In early May 2021, when asked if the CDC's summer camp guidance was excessive, Fauci responded by saying that "I wouldn't call them excessive, but they certainly are conservative" and added that the guidance "looks a bit strict" and "a bit stringent". Also in early May, Fauci said that he is "not convinced" that COVID-19 originated naturally and that "we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened". In mid-May 2021, Fauci said that Americans who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 no longer need to wear masks outdoors, except for in "completely crowded situations". This guidance was updated in July 2021 to recommend that all people wear masks regardless of vaccination status, in what Fauci said was due to the much more contagious Delta variant. In May 2021, Fauci denied that the National Institutes of Health supported "gain-of-function research" at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In early June 2021, over 3,000 internal government emails sent by Fauci from January to June 2020 were obtained by media outlets through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. These emails contain information about how the United States and Fauci initially responded to COVID-19. On June 22, 2021, Fauci said that the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant is the "greatest threat" to eliminating COVID-19 in the United States. In December 2021, Fauci, along with virologist Jeffery K. Taubenberger and David M. Morens endorsed the development of a universal coronavirus vaccine, advocating in favor of "an international collaborative effort to extensively sample coronaviruses from bats as well as wild and farmed animals to help understand the full "universe" of existing and emerging coronaviruses." In February 2022,