I have written several articles on Dr. Fauci. A list of the links have been provided at the bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address different aspects on Dr. Fauci’s career. Links for Dr. Fauci are also provided.
SciCheck Digest
Documents show that Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins received 58 royalty payments from 2010 to 2021 for their research. Only three of the payments came in 2020 or 2021; the rest were made prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. But social media posts falsely claimed all the payments were “for allowing companies to use their COVID-19 vaccines.”
Full Story
In August, Open The Books, a self-described government watchdog organization, published hundreds of new documents it obtained from the National Institutes of Health via Freedom of Information Act requests enforced through a court order. The records show that the NIH and many of its current and former employees received over $325 million in royalty payments from September 2009 to September 2021.
The royalties are for scientific research and other innovations by NIH institutes and centers that were licensed for use by third parties, such as pharmaceutical companies. Some of the money goes back into research, but a portion is shared with the government workers who invented the patented or licensed technology.
Open The Books said that among the NIH inventors who received royalty payments over that 12-year period were Dr. Francis Collins, the NIH’s former director, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Collins received 21 payments and Fauci received 37 between 2010 and 2021.
But the group’s reporting has been misused as the basis for a false claim that all of those royalties paid to the NIH, Collins and Fauci were connected to COVID-19 and the vaccines that were created to combat the disease.
“Records Reveal Fauci, Others Made Over $300 Million From the Covid Pandemic While Americans Suffered,” reads the headline of an Aug. 13 story by Townhall.com, a conservative news and commentary website. The story, which the website shared on Facebook, went on to say, “The records show Collins and Fauci got 58 royalty payments for allowing companies to use their COVID-19 vaccines, which in return was developed with funding from U.S. taxpayers by private pharmaceutical firms.”
A few days later, Mike Huckabee, the former Republican governor of Arkansas, continued the attack on Fauci in a video posted to Instagram.
“Just in case anyone still has a shrine to Dr. Fauci, with one of his bobblehead dolls in it, maybe this will open your eyes,” Huckabee began. “The watchdog group Open The Books just released about 1,500 unredacted pandemic era records showing that the leaders of the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, including Dr. Fauci, already the highest paid public servant in D.C., made over $325 million in profits off of COVID-19.”
Then Huckabee made the exact same claim as Townhall.com about Fauci and Collins getting “58 royalty payments” for the COVID-19 vaccines.
But, as we said, that is not what the records published by Open The Books show.
Most Payments Predate the Pandemic
In an email to FactCheck.org, Christopher Neefus, the nonprofit’s communications director, said his organization did “not make any claims” about the payments being linked to the COVID-19 vaccines.
“We have been clear from the beginning that this was a request for all royalties paid by third parties back to NIH and its scientists,” Neefus wrote. “[I]t’s certainly not all COVID related – that’s evident from the fact that the payments go back a decade here.”
He indicated that Open The Books did not try to determine how much of the money was related to COVID-19 vaccines or treatments. That would require additional research, he said.
While the records NIH turned over show the corresponding number for the product that was licensed and the licensee, there is no explanation of what the licensed product was or how the product was used. The agency also redacted the dollar amount of the royalties paid to each individual.
We asked NIH for more information about the licenses, but we have not received a response.
Of the nearly 57,000 payments documented by Open The Books, almost 48,000 of them were made on or prior to Dec. 5, 2019. That was before China reported the first cases of people infected with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 on Dec. 31.
Furthermore, only three of the 58 payments to Collins and Fauci were made in 2020 or 2021.
One payment to Fauci was made on Jan. 28, 2020, about a month and a half before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. The other payments to Collins and Fauci were made on Feb. 11, 2021, and April 28, 2021, respectively.
The payment to Collins was made by the Progeria Research Foundation, a nonprofit trying to find a cure for Hutchinson–Gilford progeria syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes rapid aging in children.
Fauci’s payments came from Santa Cruz Biotechnology, a company that develops products for biomedical research. Santa Cruz Biotechnology made 13 other payments to Fauci from 2010 to 2019.
When the Associated Press wrote in 2005 about previous royalties paid to Fauci, and how the payments raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest, Fauci said he planned to donate all royalties that he receives to charity. He told the AP that he tried to refuse the royalties, but was told that he was legally obligated to accept the money.
NIH told us for a 2022 story that it does not track how employees spend their royalties, which are considered personal income. So, we are not able to confirm whether Fauci donated his past royalty payments as he said.
In its report, Open The Books said Fauci “never provided proof” that he donated his royalties. But the Townhall.com article falsely claimed that the NIH records showed Fauci “failed to donate his royalties to charity as promised” – which is not what the Open The Books report said.
Royalties for the COVID-19 Vaccines
It is true that the government has been compensated for its contributions to the development of the COVID-19 vaccines.
In February, the New York Times reported that Moderna paid royalties to NIH and two American universities in December for Moderna’s licensing of a spike-protein technique used in its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
Moderna financial reports described it as “catch-up royalty payment of $400 million to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,” which is one of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers. But the Times said the payment would be split between NIH, Dartmouth College and the Scripps Research Institute, whose researchers patented the method used by Moderna.
“The individual scientists who helped invent the technique are also likely to receive a portion of the payment, experts said,” according to the Times.
The newspaper noted that, by the end of 2021, seven other pharmaceutical companies, including BioNTech, had agreed to pay those same three institutions for using the same technique in their COVID-19 vaccines.
As part of its licensing agreement, Moderna said NIAID also will receive “low single-digit royalties on future net sales” of Moderna’s vaccines, which brought in over $36 billion in revenue from 2020 to 2022.
Still, the documents secured by Open The Books do not show Fauci and Collins getting “58 royalty payments” for the COVID-19 vaccines, as was wrongly claimed in the Townhall.com article and in Huckabee’s Instagram post.
And it is not clear if Fauci or Collins financially benefited from any COVID-19-related royalties that were paid after September 2021, which is the last month covered in the records NIH released.
Who Decides When Vaccine Studies Are Done? Internal Documents Show Fauci Plays a Key Role.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease official, will oversee most of the ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials in the U.S., but not that of the current front-runner made by Pfizer, documents obtained by ProPublica show.
According to a draft charter spelling out how most of the advanced COVID-19 vaccine trials will be monitored, Fauci is the “designated senior representative” of the U.S. government who will be part of the first look at the results. That puts Fauci in the room with the companies — including Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca — in deciding whether the vaccines are ready to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
Fauci’s role, which has not been previously reported and was confirmed for ProPublica by the National Institutes of Health, could offer some reassurance in the face of widespread concerns that President Donald Trump wants to rush through an unproven vaccine. As Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice president, put it at last week’s debate, “If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it.”
But there’s a big caveat. Fauci doesn’t have the same hands-on role for the vaccine that seems poised to show results soonest: Pfizer’s. That’s because Pfizer opted not to accept government funding and participate in the federal program to develop a coronavirus vaccine, known as Operation Warp Speed. (The government did make an almost $2 billion deal with Pfizer to preorder up to 600 million doses of the company’s vaccine, but it isn’t contributing money to the vaccine’s development like it is for other companies.)
“(We) offered opportunities for collaboration with Pfizer,” said a spokesperson for the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a branch of the NIH. “Pfizer chose to conduct their Phase 3 study without Operation Warp Speed or NIH support.”
Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, said Friday that the earliest his company would be ready to apply for authorization would be the third week of November. While Pfizer might know by the end of October if its vaccine is effective, it would need additional time to gather sufficient safety data to present to the FDA, Bourla said in an open letter on the company’s website.
Fauci’s role in overseeing the companies that are participating in Operation Warp Speed arises from a unique arrangement that the government set up to monitor the trials. Typically, clinical trials set up their own independent panels of scientists, known as a data safety monitoring board or DSMB, to watch out for safety concerns or early signs of success. But all of the vaccine trials in Operation Warp Speed are sharing a common DSMB whose members were selected by Fauci’s agency, the NIAID. They’re also sharing a network of clinical trial sites where some volunteers are recruited for the studies.
A DSMB is responsible for making recommendations such as halting the trial if there is a safety concern or letting the manufacturer know that there’s enough evidence to submit an application to the FDA. Ordinarily, a DSMB’s recommendation goes to the company running the trial. In this case, the U.S. government — which gets two representatives, one from the NIAID and one from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority — will also have a seat at the table in deciding what to do next.
“Once the DSMB makes a decision, the DSMB provides the recommendation to not only the study sponsor but also to the” U.S. government, whose “designated senior representative” is Fauci, the NIAID confirmed in an email. Fauci declined to be interviewed.
That’s not the same as saying Fauci has the last word. The company and the government are supposed to reach a consensus, the agency said. But if they can’t all agree, the ultimate decision belongs with the company.
Still, it would be an improbably brazen move for a company to move ahead over Fauci’s objection, given his public stature, experts said. “These are the most important trials in medical history, this is the ultimate fishbowl,” said Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “I don’t think any sponsor would dare defy the DSMB’s recommendation.”
While the mechanics of a DSMB may be unfamiliar to most members of the public, people probably know and trust Fauci, according to Amy Pisani, executive director of the national nonprofit organization Vaccinate Your Family. “(He’s) the sweetheart of the nation right now,” Pisani said. “I do think people have faith in Anthony Fauci.”
“Having Fauci with oversight is terrific,” Topol added. “The more people who are experts looking at it, the better. You can’t be careful enough.”
Other members of the DSMB for the COVID-19 vaccines, though not as well known as Fauci, are also widely respected in their fields. DSMB members are typically kept confidential to shield them from outside influence, but ProPublica has been able to identify a few members. The charter obtained by ProPublica described the group, which has about a dozen members, as having expertise in “biostatistics, clinical trials, infectious diseases, vaccine development and ethics.”
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The panel’s chair is Dr. Richard Whitley, a professor of pediatrics, microbiology, medicine and neurosurgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His role became public when the university announced it, though the webpage was later taken down.
His leadership provides another level of comfort in the trustworthiness of the trials to those who know him. “He is not only famously bright but he is famously independent and outspoken,” said Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt Medicine. “He’ll look at the data and tell you exactly what he thinks.”
Whitley declined to comment.
Susan Ellenberg, professor of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania and a former director at the FDA, told ProPublica in an interview that many people, including herself, were worried the NIH might be “pushed by the political leadership at HHS to release data” from trials prematurely, which could undermine the integrity of a trial. HHS, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the NIH’s parent agency. Her concern was that political leaders might not understand scientific arguments to not disrupt the trials when wanting to have data “to be able to move quickly in an urgent situation,” she said.
At the time of the interview, Ellenberg had not identified herself as a member of the NIH’s DSMB, but later acknowledged that she was a member.
Dr. Malegapuru William Makgoba, an immunologist based in South Africa, is one of a few international members of the DSMB. Makgoba is well known for his work on public health initiatives around HIV/AIDS, including the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative. Makgoba confirmed his role on the DSMB but declined to comment further.
The common DSMB appears to be unprecedented, if only because there have not previously been multiple vaccines in development for the same disease at the same time. Experts said the arrangement offers benefits such as bolstering the evidence available to show that any one shot is safe and effective.
Standardizing trial measurements should make the vaccines easier to compare head to head, which may be useful for knowing whether one is better or worse than another in certain subgroups, such as the elderly or people with compromised immune systems, according to Vanderbilt’s Schaffner.
“To me, it’s better for public health to have a fairly common assessment,” said Dr. Gregory Glenn, president of research and development at Novavax, which has received $1.6 billion from Operation Warp Speed and hopes to begin its Phase 3 trial in the U.S. this month as part of the NIH’s clinical trial network.
There may also be some benefits from a safety perspective.
If a potential safety issue appears in one trial, having a common data safety monitoring board for multiple trials means that the board knows to look out for that same issue across all the trials, said Dr. Tal Zaks, chief medical officer of Moderna. “When AstraZeneca had an adverse side effect, we have a DSMB looking at our trial — the fact that it’s the same DSMB means that there’s not one DSMB that has to go educate another DSMB,” Zaks said. (ProPublica’s board chairman, Paul Sagan, is a member of Moderna’s board and a company stockholder.)
AstraZeneca’s trial has been put on hold in the U.S. while the company and the FDA investigates what happened with a participant who had a bad reaction. It’s not yet clear whether the reaction was due to the vaccine or unrelated.
“AstraZeneca is committed to working with governments and key partners to ensure we develop and gain regulatory approval for an effective vaccine as quickly as possible,” the company said in a statement.
AstraZeneca added that another benefit of joining the government’s consortium was that its large network of trial sites can help reach minority communities that are historically less represented in clinical trials and also more vulnerable to COVID-19.
Pfizer’s decision not to participate means that it and the other companies may miss out on some of these benefits of pooling resources. “It’s at least unfortunate, and not very sporting, as the British would say,” Schaffner said.
At the same time, there could be advantages to Pfizer’s going solo. “One of the greatest risks to this process is the perception of political influence, and in that regard, having parallel efforts, especially efforts seen as independent of one another and/or independent of perceived sources of political influence, is a good thing,” said Mani Foroohar, an analyst at the investment bank SVB Leerink.
Pfizer declined to comment on its decision not to join the government’s shared DSMB and trial network.
Whether it’s Pfizer or one of the companies participating in Operation Warp Speed, the final say on whether a vaccine is ready for public use belongs to the FDA.
The FDA has promised to present the data to an advisory committee of external experts in a public meeting. A preliminary meeting will be held on Oct. 22 to discuss, generally, the standards the FDA will seek to see before authorizing any vaccine. The agency has also committed to holding advisory committee meetings to review data from individual vaccine candidates.
Between the independent trial safety monitoring boards and the public advisory committee meetings, “any kind of hanky-panky there that people are worried about is going to (go through) multiple checkpoints,” Fauci said in an interview with Dr. Howard Bachner on the JAMA Network podcast on Sept. 25. “The big elephant in the room is, is somebody going to try to make a political end run to interfere with the process? … If you look at the standard process of how these things work, I think you can feel comfortable that it is really unlikely that that is going to happen.”
Critics of Dr. Anthony Fauci — the government’s top infectious-disease adviser — hint that he profited from the COVID-19 pandemic. Without evidence, they’ve raised questions about whether Fauci made any stock trades based on advance warning he had of the coronavirus threat.
Those suspicions led to this testy exchange between Fauci, and Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., at a Jan. 11 Senate hearing.
Marshall: “Yes or no. Would you be willing to submit to Congress and the public a financial disclosure that includes your past and current investments? After all, your colleague Dr. (Rochelle) Walensky (the CDC director) and every member of Congress submits a financial disclosure that includes their investments.”
Fauci: “I don’t understand why you’re asking me that question. My financial disclosure is public knowledge and has been so for the last 37 years or so.”
Marshall: “The big tech giants are doing an incredible job of keeping it from being public. We’ll continue to look for it. Where would we find it?”
Fauci: “All you have to do is ask for it. You’re so misinformed, it’s extraordinary.”
The dispute continued.
Marshall: “I cannot find them. Our office cannot find them. Where would they be, if they are public knowledge?”
Fauci: “It is totally accessible to you, if you want it.”
A few facts would add necessary context to that exchange.
First, that hearing was the first time the senator had asked for Fauci’s financial disclosure report. When Marshall said his office “cannot not find them,” it’s because they had not asked for them.
Marshall spokesman Michawn Rich told us that when Marshall said “the big tech giants” were hiding the financial disclosure report, he was being sarcastic, not asserting it as a fact.
Fauci was technically correct that the report “is totally accessible to you, if you want it,” but the process is not as simple or as quick as his words suggest.
Federal financial disclosure rules
The Ethics in Government Act covers the disclosure requirements for over 27,000 political appointees and agency officials. The Office of Government Ethics posts online the disclosure reports for roughly the top 70 Senate-confirmed political appointees. For most of the rest, including Fauci, their disclosures are available through the ethics office at the agency where the person works. Anyone can request a copy, but delays are common.
“This process can take anywhere from days to weeks,” said researcher Alex Baumgart at the Center for Responsive Politics, a group focused on government transparency. “While Fauci’s forms are available to the public, it’s not as easy as just accessing a public web page.”
Fauci’s 2019 report
Fauci has been head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.
His 2019 financial disclosure is online, thanks to reporter Liz Essley Whyte at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit news organization in Washington. Whyte posted it in August, after she heard suspicions that Fauci had invested in pharmaceutical companies. The document showed that Fauci’s money is mainly in mutual funds, and there were no holdings of individual pharmaceutical company stocks.
Whyte said she waited about two and half months to get the document. “These disclosures can’t really be found, or requested, in a few casual clicks,” Whyte said. “But they definitely could have been found by Sen. Marshall’s staff.”
She added that if the government wanted to, it could make these reports easier to get.
In his filing, Fauci submitted statements from the companies that manage his retirement accounts and other investments. The 42 pages in his report show, for example, that he had a gain of over $390,000 from one mutual fund. Another fund increased by nearly $70,000. These were unrealized gains, meaning that he hadn’t sold the mutual funds to cash in the gains. Redactions shroud the underlying value of the funds themselves, and how long he has held the securities.
The report was reviewed and approved May 18, 2020, by a federal ethics official.
Fauci was required to file a report for 2020 by the end of May 2021. Whyte said she just requested that filing.
In October 2021, Open the Books, a government transparency organization that has raised questions about Fauci’s holdings, sued the National Institutes of Health for detailed records on Fauci. Its requested document list was long, including confidentiality agreements, and a database of personal royalties paid to current and former NIH employees. Within that more extensive list was the request for Fauci’s standard financial disclosure for 2020. Adam Andrzejewski, the group’s CEO, said it had not received it. NIH will start delivering documents in February.
We filed a request for Fauci’s latest filing and will report when we learn more.
Fauci’s financial disclosures are publicly available, but the wheels can turn slowly. That said, regarding Marshall’s claim that he couldn’t find them, the wheels don’t start turning until you ask.
It’s the FDA that approves vaccines, not Dr. Fauci or the CDC. The FDA reviews the scientific data and determines whether it supports that the vaccine is safe and effective, and for what age group or any other criteria (eg for some flu vaccines, you shouldn’t take them if you’re allergic to eggs).
Most of the FDA’s decisions include an outside panel of experts to advise them. That was the case for the COVID vaccines, and at the time they were approved, I watched the proceedings of this committee. They stream the full-day meetings online, and also provide reports full of data, for anyone to read. One of the documents – also disclosed verbally in the meetings – says whether anyone has a conflict of interest. If they do, it doesn’t automatically mean they can’t participate. It does mean they’ve gone on record so if they have a contrary opinion to everyone else, other members will have some extra skepticism. They would have to have a very good reason to sway people. These meetings are very technical, it’s not people yelling at each other, even when they disagree they’re talking about data and medical knowledge. Most people don’t have any conflict. The reason not to automatically exclude people who have a conflict is that in a small field, they might be aware of some issue that someone who didn’t work in the exact area isn’t aware of. But they’ll have to support it with data, not just, “I say so.”
If you want to check out the meeting info or listen to the archived discussions, search for the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, Dec 10, 2020 (for Pfizer), and Dec 17, 2020 (for Moderna).
By the way, for context:
The CDC provides guidance about who should take the vaccine, once it’s approved, keeping in mind both scientific and other information. (For example, “Though it’s approved for everyone over 16, we recommend only people over age 65 receive doses of COVID vaccine now, because it’s in limited supply and they have the highest risk.” Or, “We recommend gay men in city x receive the monkeypox vaccine, because that’s where it’s spreading.”)
Dr. Fauci advises the President so he can communicate with the public, and also to help in making decisions such as whether research should be funded with tax dollars (as it was during Operation Warp Speed during President Trump’s term, to quickly develop a COVID vaccine). And he communicates with the public directly. He doesn’t have a role in approving vaccines.
Rand Paul and Fauci clash over NIH royalties: ‘We are going to learn about it’
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky, and Dr. Anthony Fauci clashed during a Senate hearing over royalty payments to government scientists from pharmaceutical companies.
“We’ve been asking you and you refuse to answer whether anybody on the vaccine committees gets royalties from the pharmaceutical companies. I asked you last time and what was your response? ‘We don’t have to tell you,’” Paul said. “When we get in charge, we’re gonna change the rules and you will have to divulge where you get your royalties from, from what companies and if anybody on the committee has a conflict of interest, we are going to learn about it. I promise you that.”
Paul previously challenged Fauci during a June Senate hearing over the alleged lack of transparency from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where Fauci has worked for roughly 40 years, surrounding the royalty payments.
“Over the period of time from 2010 to 2016, 27,000, royalty payments were paid to 18,000 NIH employees. We know that not because you told us, but because we forced you to tell us through the Freedom of Information Act,” Paul told Fauci during the June hearing. “Over $193 million was given to these 18,000 employees.”
“Can you tell me that you have not received a royalty from any entity that you ever oversaw the distribution of money in research grants?” Paul asked.
“You know, I don’t know as a fact, but I doubt it,” Fauci responded.
In October 2021, watchdog group Open The Books filed a federal lawsuit to obtain access to the disclosures, but the NIH redacted critical information from the records the agency ultimately provided to Open The Books, such as who the payments came from and how much was doled out.
A watchdog investigation found that scientists at the National Institutes of Health received royalty payments from third-party payers, such as pharmaceutical manufacturers, totaling roughly $134 million between 2009 and 2014.
The watchdog group Open The Books estimates that scientists at the NIH, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Director Francis Collins, received a total of $350 million in these kickback-style payments for their work on various experimental treatments over a 10-year period.
In 2005, following an Associated Press investigation, the NIH expressed concern over the royalty payments being a potential conflict of interest.
Even Dr. Fauci “said that he felt it was inappropriate to receive payment and donated the entire amount to charity,” according to the NIH.
The personal royalties are legal, but there is an apparent lack of transparency around them. It wasn’t until after the AP investigation in 2005 that the NIH created a policy to disclose the payments.
The National Desk spoke to Open The Books’s Adam Andrzejewski, who explained how it took a federal lawsuit just to receive access to the disclosures that NIH began making in 2005.
Even then, important information on the disclosure documents was redacted, such as who the payments came from and how much was doled out. Open The Books was only able to verify a topline number for the total amount given to NIH scientists via these royalty payments, as well as the total number of payments given to each scientist, Andrzejewski told TND.
This is a gatekeeping at odds with the spirit and perhaps the letter of open-records laws,” Andrzejewski wrote in his investigation.
Andrzejewski noted to TND how the agency is “slow-walking” the release of its disclosure documents relating to the royalty payments that Open The Books had to sue to access after its FOIA request was ignored.
According to Andrzejewski, the NIH admitted to holding 3,000 pages worth of disclosure information related to the royalty payments, but is only releasing 300 pages per month.
NIH is using taxpayer money to keep taxpayers in the dark. The agency refused to respond to our FOIA request. Now, NIH is using expensive taxpayer-paid litigation to slow-walk production and redact key information — refusing to show who paid the royalty and the amount paid to each individual scientist,” Andrzejewski told TND.
Last year, amid the coronavirus pandemic, the NIH gave out approximately $30 billion in government grants to roughly 56,000 recipients.
With tens of billions of dollars in grant-making at NIH and tens of millions of royalty dollars from third-party payors flowing back into the agency each year, NIH needs to come clean with the American people and open the books,” Andrzejewski told TND. “We need to be able to follow the money. Every single outside payment to a government scientist could be a conflict of interest.
Fauci argued Wednesday he had no connection to any of the government’s committees that approve or recommended vaccines.
“I don’t really understand, with all due respect Senator,” Fauci said. “They’re not my committees.”
Fauci and Paul also sparred Wednesday over why the federal government’s vaccination guidelines don’t account for natural immunity.
Paul brought forth a video from 2004, in which Fauci admits on live television “the best vaccination is to get infected yourself.”
“So when you’re trying to tell us that kid’s need a third or fourth vaccine, are you including the variability or the variable of previous infection in the studies?” Paul said to Fauci.
“No, you’re not. Because when you have approved vaccines in recent times, and the committees that have approved them for children don’t report anything on hospitalization, or death or transmission,” Paul continued. “They only report that if you give them the jab, they’ll make antibodies. And you can give kid’s hundreds of jabs and they’ll make antibodies every time but that does not prove efficacy.”
Paul ultimately accused Fauci of denying “the very fundamental premise of immunology” that previous infection provides immunity.
“It’s not in any of your studies!” Paul exclaimed.
Resources
factcheck.org, ” Conservative Posts Misrepresent Royalty Payments to Fauci and Collins.” By D’Angelo Gore; propublica.org, “Who Decides When Vaccine Studies Are Done? Internal Documents Show Fauci Plays a Key Role.” By Isaac Arnsdorf, Caroline Chen and Ryan Gabrielson; politifact.com, “Fauci said all you have to do is ask for his financial disclosure. Yes, but it could take a while.” By Jon Greenberg;Quora.com, “Does Fauci, or anyone at the CDC who approves vaccines take money, or hold any investments in the big pharma companies who make the vaccines they approve?” By Amanda Ramsey; thenationaldesk.com, “Rand Paul and Fauci clash over NIH royalties: ‘We are going to learn about it’.” By Alec Schemmel;
Dr. Fauci Postings
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/15/where-do-the-loyalties-of-the-cdc-lie/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/01/is-dr-fauci-a-devil-or-an-angel/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/30/is-the-fda-big-pharma-and-appropriately-and-dr-fauci-playing-god/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/21/dr-fauci-revisited-sour-grapes/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/30/fauci-and-hiv-and-now-coronavirus-sounds-like-dejavu/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/10/29/one-on-one-with-dr-fauci/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/01/20/is-fauci-on-his-way-out/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/05/28/was-fauci-the-proverbial-fox-guarding-the-henhouse/