Watchdog group Open The Books revealed that the wealth of former National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci surged during his first year of retirement in 2023.
According to financial disclosures obtained by the group, Fauci’s and his wife’s assets climbed to just over $15 million in total that year, increasing by $3.5 million, $3.3 million of which came from Fauci’s accounts.
Although new financial documents showing Fauci’s financial gains through 2023 do not indicate where or how the money was made, they do reveal some interesting clues,” Open The Books explained. “Notably, one of Fauci’s accounts received five large deposits over the course of the year, worth over $1.15 million in total.”
Some of the deposits are believed to come from book royalties.
“Dr. Fauci’s assets soared during the worst of the draconian Covid lockdowns while families and small businesses struggled through school closures and lost income. Now it’s clear the cash kept coming during his first year of ‘retirement,’” said Open The Books CEO John Hart. “He was rubbing elbows with groups like AHIP flanked by taxpayer-funded security — even as his wife remained the top bioethicist at NIH.”
Prior to retirement, Fauci was the nation’s highest-paid bureaucrat, leaving his career with a final salary of $480,654.
Earlier this month, Fauci spoke at Tulane University, criticizing the public’s response to COVID-19 and defending the government’s mandates surrounding the virus.
“The thing that needed to be done is that you needed to have physical distancing, which you know, people say lockdown,” he said. “We didn’t lock down. China locked down. We definitely closed a lot of things down. So I think that if you really are fair and stop the finger-pointing–in the beginning, it was absolutely essential.”
Last year, the former NIAID director told the Committee on Oversight and Accountability that he was “not aware of any evidence supporting the masking of children, and that it’s still ‘up in the air’ whether mask-wearing was associated with learning loss and speech development issues in children,” according to a memo released by the committee.
