Dr. Anthony Fauci’s fortune doubled — hitting about $15 million — between early 2019 and the end of 2023 over the course of the pandemic, including “during the worst of the draconian COVID lockdowns,’’ according to records obtained by a watchdog group.
Fauci’s net worth was about $7.6 million in January 2019 before COVID-19 hit and surged to about $15 million by the end of 2023, 141 pages of financial-disclosure forms obtained by watchdog group Open The Books revealed.
The doctor, who previously helmed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, officially left the government at the start of 2023, later than previously known.
His first year of retirement was especially lucrative — when he earned more than $3.5 million alone, the records show.
“Dr. Fauci’s assets soared during the worst of the draconian Covid lockdowns while families and small businesses struggled through school closures and lost income,” Open the Books CEO John Hart said in a statement.
“Now it’s clear the cash kept coming during his first year of ‘retirement.’ He was rubbing elbows with groups like [America’s Health Insurance Plans] flanked by taxpayer-funded security — even as his wife remained the top bioethicist at [the National Institutes of Health].”
Fauci, 84, earned the highest salary for a government bureaucrat before his retirement, taking in $480,654 during his final year. He worked in public service for more than five decades.
The Daily Caller first reported on Open the Books’ findings.
Despite announcing plans to retire at the end of 2022 and testifying before a congressional panel that he stepped down from his government role at that time, Fauci’s “Application for Immediate Retirement” shows that his date of final separation was actually Jan. 6, 2023.
“I came back to the NIH in 1972, and I started off as a senior investigator to a section head in one of the labs to the chief of the laboratory of immunoregulation in 1980, a position I held until I stepped down at the end of 2022,” Fauci testified to the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic last year.
Fauci had corresponded with NIH officials in late 2022 and was told that his retirement would become official in early January of 2023, according to an email obtained by the watchdog.
Retirements from government often face delayed processing because of an arcane paper filing system that the Department of Government Efficiency has since worked to reform.
Where did Dr. Anthony Fauci’s earnings come from?
The financial disclosures do not fully explain the source of that money but provide some hints, showing multiple six-figure tranches of payments he pocketed throughout 2023 that totaled $1.15 million.
The payments include $100,000 in April 2023, $100,000 that May, $100,000 in June, $150,000 in September and $700,000 in November of that year.
While the disclosures do not explain why or from where he received those funds, it is known that he has delivered various speeches to special interest groups during that time, including to the National Association of Chain Drug Stores in April 2023 and the American Health Insurance Plans in June of that year.
Additionally, Fauci participated in events for World Quant, an asset management firm; Japan Medical Congress, and Eminent Series, for four events.
Around March 2023, Fauci also sold his book to Penguin Random House for $5 million, as Page Six reported at the time. The autobiography, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” hit bookshelves in June 2024.
That move coincided with revelations from a congressional memo that he “prompted” a paper that dismissed the COVID lab leak theory.
Last week, the White House rolled out a new covid.gov webpage to promote the lab leak theory that posits that COVID-19 came from a lab in Wuhan, China. The website faults Fauci and promotes Trump.
“ ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’ publication — which was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the lab leak theory — was prompted by Dr. Fauci to push the preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated naturally,” the website noted.
Meanwhile, Fauci also landed a gig at Georgetown University as a distinguished university professor in July 2023.
Beyond speaking engagements, Fauci notched $50,000 from Columbia University’s Calderone Prize and $40,000 from the National Academy of Medicine’s Lienhard Prize.
His wife, Dr. Christine Grady, served in the NIH’s bioethics department until this month. She earned a salary of about $243,749 in 2023.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has largely pushed out NIH employees who were close to Fauci, a central figure in his 2021 book about the “global war on democracy and public health.”
Fauci had served as the head of the NIAID, one of the 27 institutes that make up the NIH, from 1984 until 2022.
After his retirement, Fauci benefited from taxpayer-funded security provided by the US marshals, something President Trump has since taken away from him.
The cost of that clocked in at about $15 million between January 2023 and September 2024, according to a report from Open the Books and journalist Jordan Schachtel last year.
“They all made a lot of money. They can hire their own security, too,” Trump said in January after yanking funding away for Fauci’s and other former officials’ security.
Fauci’s lawyer has not responded to a Post request for comment.
