Dr. Anthony Fauci bragged in a recent interview that he spurned multimillion-dollar job offers from major corporations to keep his plum gig as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Fauci, 83, retired from his NIAID post in 2022 as the highest-paid government employee, earning $481,000 in his last year on the job, and with a reported net-worth of more than $11 million between him and his wife.
“So, at the time that I was getting offered it … I was making $125,000, $200,000,” President Biden’s former chief medical adviser said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning,” which will air in full on June 16.
“Then I would get offered a job that would get me $5 million, $6 million, $7 million a year,” the infectious disease expert claimed.
Fauci indicated that the private-sector overtures were made by pharmaceutical companies and “private equity,” but that he turned them all down because he felt his work in public health was “priceless.”
“[I] really felt what I was doing was having an impact on what I cared about, which was the health of the country and, indirectly, the health of the world, because the United States is such a leader in science, medicine and public health that what we do, indirectly, spills over onto the rest of the world,” he said. “And to me, that is priceless.”
The US taxpayer watchdog OpenTheBooks.com reported earlier this month that the National Institutes of Health, including its scientists, received $710 million in royalties from drug makers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The NIH refuses to release the amount of royalties paid to each scientist.
Fauci has claimed he made “zero” of those dollars himself despite scientists at his NIAID subagency scooping up $690 million of that cash.
He has only acknowledged having received $122 in royalties for a monoclonal antibody he had developed 27 years ago.
Fauci joined the faculty of Georgetown University last year as a distinguished professor at the Infectious Diseases Division in its School of Medicine.
