Fauci’s first year of ‘retirement’ was a moneymaking bonanza

Fauci received several six-figure deposits through 2023 totaling $1.15 million according to a 141-page financial disclosure obtained by Open The Books, a government watchdog group.

The documents do not describe the source of the deposits.

Fauci leveraged his celebrity status as the top trusted messenger on COVID-19 to pad his earnings in 2023, just as newly empowered Congressional investigators sharpened their focus on the ways Fauci betrayed the public’s trust at the pandemic’s height.

Fauci sold his memoir to a subsidiary of Penguin Random House for a reported $5 million in March 2023. That news coincided with a March 2023 congressional memo showing Fauci had privately “prompted” an influential paper dismissing the theory that COVID could have resulted from a lab accident. On July 1, 2023, Fauci began an appointment at Georgetown University as distinguished university professor in both the School of Medicine and School of Public Policy. Roughly two weeks later, two of the coauthors of that paper testified to Congress about the extent of their collaboration with Fauci.

The White House on Friday updated the official covid.gov page to highlight this paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” and Fauci’s behind-the-scenes role in downplaying the “lab leak theory.”

Fauci also accepted speaking gigs with several special interest groups in 2023. Some of these organizations and trade associations — including the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) — have policy agendas that intersect with the federal government’s COVID-19 response or the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the NIH division that Fauci led for nearly four decades.

Fauci’s esteem in the scientific community was lucrative in 2023, despite nagging questions from Congress about his endorsement of gain-of-function research like the coronavirus experiments funded by NIAID in Wuhan, China.

Fauci accepted medals with monetary prizes from the highest echelons of academia including Columbia University’s Calderone Prize, worth $50,000, and the National Academy of Medicine’s Lienhard Prize, worth $40,000.

Fauci’s final government salary totaled an unprecedented $480,654, the highest salary earned by any of the roughly 2.4 million employees who work for the federal government, including the president, according to Open The Books. Fauci continues to accept a six-figure pension.

Fauci’s net worth roughly doubled from $7.6 million the year prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2019 to $15 million in 2023. Fauci also received taxpayer-funded transportation and security detail via the U.S. Marshals Service as a private citizen in 2023.

“Dr. Fauci’s assets soared during the worst of the draconian Covid lockdowns while families and small businesses struggled through school closures and lost income. Now it’s clear the cash kept coming during his first year of ‘retirement,’” said Open The Books CEO John Hart. “He was rubbing elbows with groups like AHIP flanked by taxpayer-funded security — even as his wife remained the top bioethicist at NIH.”

Amid concerns Fauci misled Congress under oath about the research in Wuhan, former President Joe Biden granted Fauci a pardon on Jan. 20.

Fauci did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Delayed Retirement

Fauci announced in August 2022 that he would retire in December 2022. At the time, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer of Kentucky warned that “retirement can’t shield Dr. Fauci from congressional oversight.”

In November 2022, Congressional Republicans — who had been investigating connections between Fauci’s NIAID and the Wuhan Institute of Virology — won control of the House of Representatives and thus key committees.

Now, Open The Books has uncovered evidence through Fauci’s Application for Immediate Retirement that he delayed his retirement until Jan. 6, 2023 — three days after the new Congress started — but misinformed Congress about the change.

Fauci sent a request to NIH Acting Director Larry Tabak to delay his retirement in order to retain personal protection, emails suggest.

An email from Tabak to Fauci indicates a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Marshals Service was still tied up in the Office of General Counsel.

“OGC is working to clear the MOU from the USMS,” Tabak said in a Dec. 27, 2022, email to Fauci confirming his delayed retirement date.

In both a transcribed interview with congressional investigators in January 2024 and in public congressional testimony under oath in June 2024, Fauci described his retirement from federal service as having occurred in December 2022.

Bioethics?

Some of the growth in the Fauci household’s net worth stems from the taxpayer-funded salary of Dr. Christine Grady, a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, who earned $263,005 in 2024.

An NIH official told the DCNF earlier this month that although Grady had a good reputation within the bioethics discipline, she had a conflict of interest that posed ethical questions of its own.

“One of the problems when the coverup was going on of the Wuhan lab leak, that whole fiasco, was that they were not listening to anyone giving ethics advice,” the official said. “If they had had someone at the table with knowledge of this, they would have said: ‘Hey do you want to play it this way, or be more transparent?’ Someone could have raised the question.”

“That’s something Christine Grady could have, or should have, done,” the official continued. “She wasn’t able to do it because she was Fauci’s wife.”

“Maybe they had discussions in private about what was going on,” the official said. “She was placed in a conflicted role because of that.”

Grady was among the employees at the Department of Health and Human Services affected by the department-wide restructuring and reduction in force prompted by the Department of Government Efficiency earlier this month. Grady was reportedly given a choice between relocating away from the couple’s tony Beltway neighborhood to an Indian Health Service post or leaving HHS.

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