Dr. Anthony Fauci’s $417,608 Tops All Federal Salaries, but Does Performance Match the Pay?
The highest-paid federal government employee is Dr. Anthony Fauci, with a salary of $417,608 according to a Fox Business report based on a Freedom of Information request by OpenTheBooks.com. Whether Dr. Fauci deserves a higher salary than the president of the United States is a matter of some controversy.
Dr. Fauci has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 but his career in government goes back 53 years. In 1968, two years after he earned his medical degree, Dr. Fauci hired on with the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Fauci has changed his mind on the threat of the Wuhan coronavirus, the utility of masks, the damaging effects of lockdowns, and the date when herd immunity might be achieved.
Last August, actor Matthew McConaughey asked Fauci if he had any investments in COVID-19 vaccines. Fauci replied, “No, I got zero. I am a government worker. I have a government salary.” Fauci didn’t spell out the top-drawer $417,608 salary and mentioned no past entanglements with drug companies. Embattled Americans have reason to wonder.
Dr. Fauci’s bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology, so strictly speaking he is not a virologist. Even so, Dr. Fauci became the federal government’s point man on AIDS, and in that cause supported the drug AZT, manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome.
As John Lauritsen noted in Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story, Dr. Fauci was a zealot to expand the market for AZT. In the foreword, UC Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg explained that “AZT action is totally nonspecific termination of DNA synthesis” and never saved a life.
In Inventing the AIDS Virus, Professor Duesberg charts how in 1989 Fauci’s NIAID conducted trials of AZT on pregnant mothers injected with HIV. As Duesberg noted, “A drug that interferes with growth can lead only to physical deformities in babies developing in the womb.” Fauci’s predictions that AIDS would ravage the nation turned out wrong, but in the best bureaucratic style, he remained at the helm of NIAID.
Under Dr. Fauci, NIAID funded dangerous gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As Angelo Codevilla notes in “Dismounting the COVID Tiger,” documentation is now emerging about the role of Fauci’s NIAID with the WIR. See here and here and here.
Meanwhile, after a meeting with Dr. Fauci on January 22, President Biden announced “There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.” As the CNBC report noted, “it wasn’t immediately made clear what projections Biden was referencing.”
