“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
—C. S. Lewis
For five decades, Dr. Anthony Fauci has wielded formidable power to fortify the pharmaceutical industry’s explosive growth and its corrosive influence over our government regulatory agencies and public health policy. During his fifty-year career, Dr. Fauci has nurtured a complex web of financial entanglements among pharmaceutical companies and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and its employees that has transformed NIAID into a seamless subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Fauci unabashedly promotes his sweetheart relationship with Pharma as a “public-private partnership.”1
From his perch at NIAID, Dr. Fauci has used his $6 billion annual budget2 to achieve dominance and control over a long list of agencies and governing bodies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Pentagon, the White House, the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN) organizations, and into the deep pockets of the Clinton and Gates Foundations, and Britain’s The Wellcome Trust.
A leviathan yearly grant budget gives Dr. Fauci power to make and break careers, enrich—or punish—university research centers, manipulate scientific journals, and to dictate not just the subject matter and study protocols, but also the outcome of scientific research across the globe. Since 2005, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funneled an additional $1.7 billion3 into Dr. Fauci’s annual discretionary budget to launder sketchy funding for biological weapons research, often of dubious legality. This Pentagon funding brings the annual total of grants that Dr. Fauci dispenses to an astonishing $7.7 billion—almost twice the annual donations of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Working in close collaboration with pharmaceutical companies and other large grant makers, including Bill Gates—the biggest funder of vaccines in the world—Dr. Fauci has consistently used his awesome power to defund, bully, silence, de-license, and ruin scientists whose research threatens the pharmaceutical paradigm, and to reward those scientists who support him. Dr. Fauci rewards loyalty with prestigious sinecures on key HHS committees when they continue to advance his interests. When the so-called “independent” expert panels license and recommend new pharmaceuticals, Dr. Fauci’s control over these panels gives him the power to fast-track his pet drugs and vaccines through the regulatory hurdles, often skipping key milestones like animal testing or functional human safety studies.
Dr. Fauci’s funding strategies evince a bias for developing and promoting patented medicines and vaccines, and for sabotaging and discrediting off-patent therapeutic drugs, nutrition, vitamins, and natural, functional, and integrative medicines. Under his watch, drug companies engineered the opioid crisis and made American citizens the globe’s most over-medicated population.4 During his half-century as America’s Health Czar, Dr. Fauci has played a central role in crafting a world where Americans pay the highest prices for medicine5 and suffer worse health outcomes compared to other wealthy countries.6 Adverse drug reactions are among the nation’s top four leading causes of death, after cancer and heart attacks.7,8 Dr. Fauci’s impressive longevity at NIAID is largely due to his enthusiasm for promoting this Pharma-centric agenda.
NIAID: A Pharma Subsidiary
Under Dr. Fauci’s management, NIAID has become the center of a web of corrupting financial ties with the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Fauci’s NIAID looks much more like a drug company than any sort of agency to advance science.
“I’ve been interviewing scientists for a long time in this country, and let me tell you something. There are two kinds: Those who are serfs of Anthony Fauci and those who are genuine scientists. The serf class will refract whatever the latest Lysenkoism is from Fauci and NIAID. They are protecting their grants,” says Celia Farber, whose 2006 Harper’s article, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Destruction of Medical Science,” laid bare the culture of squalor, corruption, and violence at the vendetta-driven Division of AIDS (DAIDS). “The latter [genuine scientists] are the minority. They look, sound, and behave like scientists. And to varying degrees, they all live in a climate of both economic and reputational persecution. Peter Duesberg is one very famous example but there are others. Fauci’s vendetta system has many ways of crushing the natural scientific impulse—to question and to demand proof. Breathtakingly, because of Fauci’s impact since 1984, this tradition has been all but snuffed out in the US. ‘Everybody is afraid.’ How many times have I heard that line?”
By all accounts, Anthony Fauci has implemented a system of dysfunctional conflicts and a transactional culture that have made NIAID a seamless appendage of Big Pharma. There is simply no daylight between NIAID and the drugmakers. It’s impossible to say where Pharma ends and NIAID begins. “It’s like Ozark,” says Farber.