Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the chief medical advisor to Joe Biden, is reportedly eligible for the largest federal retirement package in U.S. history.
The 81-year-old has said he does not plan to retire soon. “There’s no way I’m going to walk away from this until we get this under control,” Fauci told ABC’s Johnathan Karl earlier this month. “I mean, that’s the purpose of what we do. That’s — that’s our mission in life. In the middle of it, I’m not going to walk away.” However, if he did retire, Forbes auditors at OpenTheBooks.com say that Fauci’s 55 years of service in the federal government qualify him for an annual retirement package of $350,000, which would go up through annual cost-of-living adjustments.
Moreover, Fauci is currently the federal government’s highest-paid employee, earning $434,321 in 2020 — a sum higher than that of the president, the military’s highest-ranking commanders, and the rest of the federal government’s 4.3 million employees.
The NIAID chief recently made headlines by suggesting that mandatory masks on airlines should continue into the indefinite future and voiced support for a vaccine requirement on domestic flights.
During his exchange with Karl, Fauci said, “We want to make sure people keep their masks on. I think the idea of taking masks off, in my mind, is really not something we should even be considering.”
He added, “Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do and we should be doing it.”
Fauci went on to say that “A vaccine requirement for a person getting on the plane is just another level of getting people to have a mechanism that would spur them to get vaccinated; namely, you can’t get on a plane unless you’re vaccinated, which is just another one of the ways of getting requirements, whatever that might be. So I mean, anything that could get people more vaccinated would be welcome.”
Fauci has also been a proponent on Joe Biden’s vaccine employer mandate for companies.The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently initially blocked the mandate, but the Sixth Circuit overruled that in a consolidated appeal.
As a result, a group of 47 Republican senators and 136 House members is asking the Supreme Court to block enforcement of the mandate
The brief by Republican lawmakers argues that under Biden, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is acting outside the limits of its authority. They assert OSHA was created to protect workers from specific workplace hazards but never from viruses like COVID-19.
“The ETS provision of the OSH Act allows OSHA to address only ‘grave danger’ in the workplace, which includes any ‘toxic or physically harmful’ agent,” the brief reads. “In the statutory scheme established by Congress, these conditions are a meaningful restraint on the agency. OSHA, however, aggressively reads the restrictions as an opportunity for the agency to branch out into public healthcare policy.”
The New American recently reported that Fauci and the National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins colluded to conduct a “quick and devastating” take-down of a document advocating for a lockdown-free COVID-19 response strategy.
Emails released last week by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis revealed retiring NIH Director Collins telling Fauci in October 2020 to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — an international document signed by nearly 900,000 physicians that warns against “the damaging physical and mental health impacts” of lockdowns and other forceful measures while calling for achieving herd immunity through “focused protection” of the most vulnerable.
In addition, reports have surfaced about Fauci doling out millions of dollars in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which COVID-19 escaped into the general Chinese public, starting the pandemic.
Per a report from Fox’s The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton, Fauci continued gain-of-function research even after an Obama administration ban, ultimately funding a China-based study that “unlocked a highly specific doorway into the human body.” That’s the same pathway used by COVID-19. According to the January 24 report, Fauci argued in a Washington Post article that “important information and insight can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory.”
