Dr. Fauci launched his career by allowing Burroughs Wellcome (now GlaxoSmith-Kline) to charge $10,000 annually28 for azidothymidine (AZT), an antiretroviral medication developed exclusively by NIH and tested and approved by Dr. Fauci himself. Dr. Fauci knew that the product cost Burroughs Wellcome a mere $5/dose to manufacture.29 Higher profit for industry “partners” often means more extravagant royalty payments for his NIAID and NIH cronies.
Another antiviral drug developed by Dr. Fauci’s shop, remdesivir, provides a recent example of a similar Pharma money-making scheme facilitated by NIAID/NIH. While remdesivir proved worthless against COVID, Dr. Fauci altered the study protocols to give his pet drug the illusion of efficacy.30, 31 Despite opposition from FDA and WHO, Dr. Fauci declared from the White House that remdesivir “will be the standard of care” for COVID, guaranteeing the company a massive global market. Dr. Fauci then overlooked Gilead’s price gouging; the company sold remdesivir for $3,300–$5,000 per dose, during the COVID pandemic. The raw materials to make remdesivir cost Gilead under $10. Medicaid must, by law, cover all FDA-approved drugs, so taxpayers again foot the bill. Through these boondoggles, Anthony Fauci has made himself the leading angel investor of the pharmaceutical industry.
The disparate treatment of patented versus less expensive off-patent COVID-19 drug treatments by federal health agencies clearly exposes Dr. Fauci’s historic bias for high-ticket patent medicines that favor extravagant pharmaceutical industry profits over public health.32
A 2017 study in the Emory Corporate Governance and Accountability Review summarizes how compromised federal public health officials like Dr. Fauci have transformed NIAID, NIH, CDC, and FDA into pharmaceutical marketing machines.33 The Emory researchers paint drug and vaccine makers as “thick as thieves,” with HHS officials acting not as regulators, but as “enablers, or perhaps worse still, [they are] complicit in questionable or ethically unsound activity as a result of being driven by self-serving motives . . .” According to Dr. Michael Carome, a former HHS official and a director of the advocacy group Public Citizen, “Instead of a regulator and a regulated industry, we now have a partnership. . . . That relationship has tilted the agency [HHS] away from a public health perspective to an industry friendly perspective.”34 Dr. Fauci is the human face of this corrupt dynamic.
Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the commercial features of this partnership have eclipsed his agency’s mission to advance science. At NIAID, the Pharma tail now wags the public health dog. Dr. Fauci has done almost nothing to advance NIAID’s core obligation of researching the causes of the devastating explosions in epidemics of chronic allergic and autoimmune diseases that, under his tenure, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children,35 up from 12.8 percent when he took charge of NIAID in 1984.36 While ignoring the explosion of allergic conditions, Dr. Fauci has instead reshaped NIAID into the leading incubator for new pharmaceutical products, many of which, ironically, profit from the cascading chronic disease pandemic.
Over the last fifty years at NIH, Dr. Fauci has played a leading role in Big Pharma’s engineered demolition of American health and democracy, working hand in glove with pharmaceutical companies to overcome federal regulatory obstacles and transform the NIH and NIAID into a single-minded vehicle for development, promotion, and marketing of patented pharmaceutical products, including vaccines and vaccine-like products.
Most of us would like “America’s Doctor” to properly diagnose our illnesses using the best science, and then instruct us on how to get healthy. What if, instead of spending their entire budgets developing profitable pharmaceutical products, Dr. Fauci and the heads of other NIH institutes deployed researchers to explore the links between glyphosate in food and the explosion of gluten allergies, the link between pesticide residues and the epidemic of neurological diseases and cancers, the causal connections between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease, between mercury from coal plants and escalating autism rates, and the association of airborne particulates with the asthma epidemic? What if NIH financed research to explore the association between childhood vaccines and the explosion of juvenile diabetes, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis, and the links between aluminum vaccine adjuvants and the epidemics of food allergies and allergic rhinitis? What if they studied the impacts of sugar and soft drinks on obesity and diabetes, and the association between endocrine disruptors, processed foods, factory farms, and GMOs on the dramatic decline in public health? What would Americans look like if, for fifty years, we had a public health advocate running one of our top health agencies—instead of a Pharma shill? What would have happened if we’d spent that hundreds of billions dollars on real science, instead of drug development? Dr. Fauci seems willing only to give us diagnoses and cures that benefit Big Pharma—instead of public health—and to cover his trail with artifice.
His critics have compared Dr. Fauci to a similarly long-lived federal agency bureaucrat, J. Edgar Hoover, who used his five-decade dictatorial control of the FBI to transform the agency into a vehicle for shielding organized crime, fortifying his corrupt political partners, oppressing Black Americans, surveilling his political enemies, suppressing free speech and dissent, and as a platform for building a cult of personality around his own inflated ego. More recently, Dr. Fauci’s perennial biographer, Charles Ortleb, analogized Dr. Fauci’s career and pathological mendacity to the sociopathic con men Bernie Madoff and Charles Ponzi.37 Another critic, author J. B. Handley, labeled Dr. Fauci “a snake oil salesman” and a “bigger medical charlatan than Rasputin.”38 Economist and author Peter Navarro, former Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, observed during a national network television interview in April 2021 that “Fauci is a sociopath and a liar.”39
His white lab coat, his official title, and his groaning bookshelves crowded with awards from his medical cartel collaborators allow Dr. Fauci to masquerade as a neutral, disinterested scientist and selfless public servant driven by a relentless commitment to public health. But Dr. Fauci doesn’t really do public health. By every metric, his fifty-year regime has been a catastrophe for American health. But as a businessman, his success has been boundless.
In 2010, Dr. Fauci told adoring New Yorker writer Michael Specter that his go-to political playbook is Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather.40 He spontaneously recited his favorite line from Puzo’s epic: “It’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business.”
Endnotes
1. Coronavirus Response, 116th United States Congress, May 12, 2020, Testimony of Dr. Anthony Fauci, https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/dr-anthony-fauci-cdc-director-senate-testimony-transcript-may-12 at 34:06
2. “NIAID Budget Data Comparisons,” NIH/NIAID (2021), https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/niaid-budget-data-comparisons