WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - Dr. Anthony Fauci will have a net worth of more than $12.6 million in retirement as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
That’s partly because his net worth increased by $5 million between 2019 and 2021 alone, according to OpentheBooks.com, a governmental financial watchdog.
“There may be a perfectly logical and rational answer for that,” said former Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill.
“He may have made good investments but certainly the fact that someone who's so intimately tied to the response to the pandemic and so intimately involved with the pharmaceutical industry raises questions that prudence would suggest should be answered so that all sorts of speculations can be put to rest.”
OpenTheBooks.com auditors calculated Fauci’s net worth based on 2021 financial disclosures from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that were obtained through four federal lawsuits. However, details about royalties were redacted.
“Are there royalties that he received as a result of any connections involving the pandemic, any type of vaccine-related information, or any type of pandemic-related treatment,” Hill asked. “That's something that people should know about.”
The report, published on Substack, found that between 2010 and 2020, Fauci earned $3.7 million as a federal employee and that his wife, Christine Grady, who is a chief bioethicist at the NIH, earned $1.6 million since 2015. Together, they accrued an additional $1.3 million in savings.
“This is a time period when a lot of people were hurting, so it just raises questions like where the savings came from,” Hill told Legal Newsline.
Overall, the Fauci household’s combined income increased from $5.8 million in 2016 to $12.6 million in 2022.
“There should always be some concern about family members involved in corporate responsibility,” Hill said. “You want to make sure that the person who's making decisions about payment or enumeration is making those decisions without self-interest. If there's no buffer between the principal and the person who's getting the pay, then there can be an expectation of scrutiny over whether the payment schedule or the remuneration makes sense.”
Finally, Hill took issue with the potential politicization of Fauci’s $901,400 award from the Dan David Foundation in Israel for “speaking truth to power” and “defending science” during the Trump administration.
“That's troubling,” he said. “It sounds as though Fauci was paid money by a foreign group outside of the country. Speaking truth to power suggests that he's being paid to be a disruptor in the Trump administration."
The Dan David Foundation supports research, higher education, and achievements in the sciences and humanities, according to its website.
“When you're employed by the federal government to make decisions that are in the best interest of the public, you don't get a bonus from a foreign country, a foreign company, or even a domestic company,” Hill added. “If he's doing his job and he is doing the job right, he's getting his remuneration from the United States of America.”