Tracking Dr. Fauci’s Fallout

Last month the Justice Department filed criminal charges against Dr. David Morens of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for using his private email to conceal official activities from the public.

According to federal prosecutors, Dr. Morens tried to keep taxpayer dollars flowing to the EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Peter Daszak. He was the middleman in NIAID’s dealings with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which also, prosecutors charge, handed out gifts to Dr. Morens.

The accused is a former top aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had been the head of NIAID since 1984. Dr. Fauci is doubtless the primary target of the prosecution, but there’s a problem.

Dr. Fauci funded the WIV to perform dangerous gain-of-function research, but maintained that the COVID virus emerged naturally in the wild. The NIAID boss teamed with NIH director Francis Collins to brand dissenters as conspiracy theorists, fringe epidemiologists, and so forth. 

In 2021, Sen. Rand Paul referred Dr. Fauci for criminal charges, but the Biden DOJ took no action. On his last day in the White House, Biden pardoned Dr. Fauci without indicating any crime he had committed. The action against Dr. Morens provides a clue, but the possibilities are far more extensive.

Dr. Jonathan Fishbein, an official of the National Institute of Health’s Office for Policy in Clinical Research Operations, was fired after flagging misconduct in Dr. Fauci’s trial of nevirapine to treat AIDS. “Dealing with Tony Fauci is like dealing with organized crime,” Dr. Fishbein told Robert F. Kennedy Jr., author of The Real Anthony Fauci. “He’s always got people that he’s giving money to in powerful positions to make sure he gets his way, that he gets what he wants.”

As the people should know, if crimes were uncovered and prosecuted, that would not exhaust Dr. Fauci’s damage to the nation’s health beyond what has already been documented.

Dr. Fauci earned an MD in 1966 and, in 1968, took a job at NIH. His bio showed no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry, but in 1984, the NIH made him head of NIAID. Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, contended that Dr. Fauci, “should not be in a position like he’s in,” but NIH kept him there and put him in charge of AIDS.

In that role, Fauci encountered Mullis’s colleague Peter Duesberg, the UC Berkeley molecular biologist who hoped to unlock the secrets of cancer. In 1989, the NIH gave Duesberg an Outstanding Investigator Award, one of the most prestigious and coveted grants. The Berkeley professor disagreed with Fauci that the retrovirus HIV was the sole cause of AIDS and that AZT (azidothymidine), rejected for cancer treatment because of excessive toxicity, was an acceptable treatment.

Funding for Professor Duesberg’s laboratory began to disappear under Dr. Fauci, who controlled both AIDS policy and spending on medical research. Duesberg’s laboratory once boasted two secretaries and jostled with postdocs, but by 2008, the only occupants were the professor and one graduate student. Had Dr. Fauci not cut off the funding, a cure for cancer might be closer at hand.

This is what happens when a government bureaucrat gains a powerful post with no Senate confirmation. This is what happens when a single person controls public health policy and medical research funding. This is what happens when a medical bureaucrat exercises executive-level power without ever facing a vote of the people. This is what happens when that bureaucrat, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is never held accountable and is granted a presidential pardon.

Once slandered by Fauci and Collins as a fringe epidemiologist, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya now directs the NIH. The Stanford medical professor, who also holds a PhD in economics, must ensure that nobody like Dr. Fauci ever emerges again. Cut NIAID down to size, make the director subject to Senate confirmation, limit the term to four years, and post all grants online in real time. For the NIH, the tasks do not end there.

Peter Duesberg passed away in January at age 89. Find somebody to fill his shoes in the quest to cure cancer, and ensure that he or she gets the funding their research deserves. The people will be watching.