By Connor Boyack | Commentary, Self-Evident
On May 21, 2020, in his newly released pandemic diary, Anthony Fauci opens his daily entry with a ledger. Global COVID-19 cases. New cases. Deaths. Italy’s toll, now past China’s. The American numbers underneath. Then a line about the task force meeting, and a note that the press conference went well.
Then, with no transition whatsoever, the subject changes. A flattering profile has run on the front page of The Washington Post. His fame, he writes, has become explosive and unimaginable. It would not be hyperbole, he assures himself, to say that he is now “the most famous and talked about person in the country.” (This, in addition to calling himself “the most credible scientist in the world.” )
He was writing to himself. There was no audience to perform for, no interviewer to charm, no adversary to rebut. Whatever else the diary is, it is the sound of a man alone with his own thoughts, one paragraph below the day’s death count.
Senator Rand Paul, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released the journals this weekend, days before Fauci is scheduled to testify under subpoena. Fauci’s vanity is going viral on 𝕏 because vanity is easily observable, a little funny, and confirms what half the country already suspected about him. (Don’t count on legacy media to notice; they were complicit in elevating him to saintly status in the first place.)
Yet the diary is the least consequential document in the release. The file that matters more came out a day earlier.
Anthony Fauci, the highest-paid official in the federal government, accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash prizes during the pandemic. NIH’s second-ranking official functioned as his personal awards manager. His taxpayer-funded staff drafted the nominations. The largest purse came from abroad: the Dan David Foundation, headquartered at Tel Aviv University, named him a laureate in February 2021 and wired him $900,000, the balance of a million-dollar prize after the foundation’s customary scholarship set-aside. The citation honored him for “defending science.”
Consider the optics of this. A federal employee’s salaried subordinates prepare his application for a prize. The prize is awarded. The honor then circulates through the press, and through the man’s own account of himself, as “independent” confirmation of his integrity. The laurel that was manufactured in-house comes back as evidence.
In October 2018, Fauci wrote to Barton Haynes of Duke asking Haynes to nominate him for the Shaw Prize; the same day, he floated the Heinz Award as a second target. The Shaw Prize discards self-nominations; the Heinz Awards forbid them outright. What the rules prohibit directly, a friendly phone call arranges indirectly. And why was the phone call so friendly? Because Haynes has won three consecutive grants from Fauci’s institute: $300 million in 2005, up to $139 million in 2012, and $129 million in 2019. More than half a billion taxpayer dollars moving in one direction, and a request for a prize nomination moving back the other. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.
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