The scientific director of Italy’s leading infectious disease hospital offered Wednesday to hire Dr. Anthony Fauci if President Donald Trump removes him from the White House coronavirus task force, saying quite simply “the world needs Fauci.” Dr. Giuseppe Ippolito of Rome’s Lazzaro Spallanzani hospital said in an interview with The Associated Press that no one knows infectious disease better than Fauci.

“There is no one else who has written the history of medicine and infectious diseases like Tony Fauci,” he told the AP. “There is no one else who has been able to write about, and to decrypt, the secrets of infectious diseases.” Ippolito wrote a letter to the Italian president and other officials, saying Italy should welcome Fauci with open arms. The country is the European epicenter of the pandemic, and Spallanzani treated its first patients.