Dr. Anthony Fauci drew a salary of $434,312 in 2020, making him the federal government’s highest-paid employee for the second year in a row, and the top earner among dozens of Medical Officers getting big bucks throughout the executive branch.
Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and current chief medical advisor to the president, was paid $417,608 in 2019.
That’s according to federal compensation data compiled and published by Open Books, an Illinois-based non-profit that compiles and publishes millions of salary, pension, and other spending data for the federal and state governments, as well as the nation’s largest cities. federal salary database can be found here.
Fauci is paid more than the President of the United States, the Vice-President, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (CA), and all nine of the Supreme Court Justices.
Fauci, at $399,625, was the third highest-paid federal employee in 2018, exceeded only by Robert J. Wylie, a Medical Officer colleague at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Second highest that year was yet another HHS Medical Officer, Rachel Sherman, at $399,750.
Fauci received $384,625 in 2017 and 2016. A spokesman for Fauci’s agency did not immediately respond to Pezou’ request for comment.
Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and made public Wednesday by Open Books reveal that Fauci’s big break into the highest paid ranks of the federal government came under President George W. Bush.
justification for Fauci’s huge pay boost—from $200,000 to $335,000, a 68 percent increase from 2004 to 2006 — was his launching a counter-bioterrorism research program at NIAID in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. and the Sept. 18, 2001, Anthrax attack on Congress that followed a week later.
Fauci oversaw the research and writing of a 15-page document—the NIAID Strategic Plan for Biodefense Research—that described the proposed program’s goals and needed resources.
permanent pay hike was “in order to appropriately compensate him for the level of responsibility in his current position of Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), especially as it relates to his work on biodefense research activities,” according to a Dec. 2004 letter released by Open Books.
Fauci was described in that letter as “leading the development of a series of research initiatives, has coordinated fast-track initiatives for academia and industry participation in biodefense-related research, and is responsible for the development of future intermediate and long-range research plans and policies for a sustained and committed biomedical research response to bioterrorism threats. During FY2004, under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, NIAID significantly expanded, intensified, and accelerated its research programs in biodefense.”
A major goal of the biodefense research was to help prevent pandemics in the United States caused by terrorist groups or by one or more of the country’s national adversaries, including especially Russia and communist China.
From that point to the present day, Fauci has overseen the awarding of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of research grants to academic, corporate and institutional researchers in biodefense areas.
Included among those thousands of grants was one begun in 2014 and renewed annually thereafter, entitled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” That initial grant was awarded by Fauci’s agency to the EcoHealth Alliance, the New York-based non-profit that has been deeply involved in research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Many U.S. experts and government officials suspect the CCP virus that has killed more than 725,000 Americans since early 2020 either accidentally leaked or was purposely released from the Wuhan facility.
“Most emerging human viruses come from wildlife, and these represent a significant threat to global public health and biosecurity—as demonstrated by the SARS coronavirus pandemic of 2002-03 and an ongoing SARS-like epidemic in the Middle East,” according to the grant award, which was initially for more than $660,000.
“This project seeks to understand what factors allow animal Coronaviruses to evolve and jump into the human population by studying virus diversity in a critical group of animals (bats), a sites of high risk for emergence (wildlife markets) in an emerging disease hotspot (China),” the award continued.
EcoHealth grants have been controversial from the outset because of their connection with “Gain of Function” research. Such research seeks to develop ways of strengthening the effects of viruses such as the coronavirus. President Barack Obama directed a “pause” in U.S. funding of such research in 2014, but Fauci renamed the research and resumed the grants in 2017, in a move that reportedly surprised many in the biodefense and medical research communities.
Pezou : Fauci, Washington’s Highest-Paid Fed, Got Big Break Under George W. Bush