Christine Grady, a senior bioethicist at the National Institute of Health and wife to Dr. Anthony Fauci, lost her job at the hands of the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Wednesday.
Federal officials close to the latest round of layoffs said Grady was terminated in part for failing to investigate the theory that a lab leak in Wuhan catalyzed the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. An HHS spokesman told media outlets that the reduction was part of a broader restructuring at NIH to shift its focus away from pandemic preparedness and toward more immediate concerns.
Grady, whose research focuses on the likelihood of future pandemics, was not the only bioethicist let go. Others were offered positions in Alaska, Montana, Minnesota, or other outposts hundreds or thousands of miles away from their homes. It’s unclear if a similar offer was made to Grady.
Even as colleagues applauded the work Grady performed, they acknowledged her marriage to Fauci — a favorite foil of President Donald Trump — hindered her ability to remain at the agency.
One source told the Daily Caller Grady is “a good person with a major conflict of interest.”
“One of the problems when the coverup was going on of the Wuhan lab leak, that whole fiasco, was that they were not listening to anyone giving ethics advice,” the official said. “If they had had someone at the table with knowledge of this, they would have said: ‘Hey do you want to play it this way, or be more transparent?’ Someone could have raised the question.”
Maybe they had discussions in private about what was going on,” the official said. “She was placed in a conflicted role because of that.”
The couple have a net worth surpassing $11 million, a figure that rose by more than $7 million since the start of the pandemic, according to the outlet.
Fauci famously cashed in upon his retirement from the government, nabbing a $5 million publishing deal for his memoir.
Other allies of the anti-Trump health expert were let go in the purge. Clifford Lane, who served as the deputy director of clinical research and special projects at Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and had been with the agency since 1991, was dismissed.
Fired too was NIAID Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Director Emily Erbelding, a key employee who participated in discussions between Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak about the connection between NIAID and the Wuhan virology lab. U.S. intelligence officials now believe with a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan lab, which had received funding from EcoHealth Alliance, was studying gain-of-function strains of the coronavirus when it escaped.
