Anthony Fauci and his wife netted $2 million during Covid pandemic, records show – and are now worth $11 million

Former White House top doctor Anthony Fauci netted $2 million in earnings during the Covid pandemic, records show.

A Freedom of Information Act request filed at the end of his tenure revealed Fauci and his wife Dr Christine Grady had a net worth that exceeded $11 million in 2022 – up from $7.6 million in 2019.

As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and later chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, Dr Fauci, now 82, was the best-paid public servant in the US, earning about $480,000 per year – more than the president’s yearly salary of $400,000.  

He earned extra wealth during Covid through speaking engagements, awards, compensation for government work, and royalties from working in academic publishing.

Financial disclosures obtained by Fox News show that by the end of 2022, Dr Fauci’s account balance totaled $9.25 million. With the addition for $2.2 million from his wife Dr Christine Brady’s assets, their total net worth added up to $11.45 million

His wife Dr Grady, chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, earned about $239,000 in 2021, though 2022 figures were not made available. 

Financial disclosures obtained by Fox News show that by the end of 2022, Dr Fauci’s account balance totaled $9.25 million. With the addition for $2.2 million from his wife Christine’s assets, their total net worth added up to $11.45 million. 

Dr Fauci rose to prominence during the Covid pandemic when he became an advisor to then-President Donald Trump to deal with the burgeoning crisis. 

He was a political lightning rod, having pushed for policies that ultimately shut the country down and inflicted lasting damage on the economy. 

Others saw him as a calming and sensible figure at the White House’s daily Covid briefs.

Before his retirement in late 2022, Dr Fauci’s salary had reached $480,654 – about $80,000 more than the President makes – up by nearly $25,000 from the year before. 

The couple saw a $1.1 million financial dip from 2021 to 2022. Before then, their net worth was about $12.6 million. 

Net worth is a total of all a person’s assets minus money they owe. And open records data show the Faucis had a lot of lucrative assets. 

OpenTheBooks CEO Adam Andrzejewski had analyzed the Faucis’ past disclosures to form a fuller picture of their wealth. His analysis found that the Faucis’ assets were held in a mix of trusts, retirement, and college education accounts. 

Dr Fauci’s total investment account in 2021 was valued at around $10.2 million, while his wife’s totaled around $2.4 million. 

In 2021, his stock portfolio earned $910,174, an increase from gains the year before of more than $794,000. Dr Fauci also invested heavily in mutual funds, but those figures are not public. 

He has also earned hundreds of thousands in awards and speaking engagements. For instance he was awarded $1 million in January 2021 for the Dan David prize affiliated with Israel’s Tel Aviv University for ‘courageously defending science in the face of uninformed opposition’ during the pandemic.

He kept $901,400 and donated the rest to hand-picked scholarship winners.  

Now that Dr Fauci is retired, he will collect a federal pension estimated to come to about $375,000 this year. It could reach as high as $530,000 in subsequent years. 

Dr Fauci, who has been criticized sharply for his role during the pandemic in pushing to close schools in order to stem the spread of Covid, relied on taxpayers to pay his salary as a government employee. 

As head of the White House’s Covid response team, he advocated to then-President Trump in 2020 to ‘shut the country down’, which would include schools and businesses. But fewer than two years later, he told The Hill that ‘I didn’t recommend locking anything down.’  

He has also been slammed for flip-flopping on masking advice, famously saying in the early days of the pandemic that limited supplies of protective equipment should be reserved for medical professionals, adding the benefit to civilians is minimal. 

The doctor has repeatedly defended the government’s many changes in course, from discouraging masks and in-person classes to pushing masks on everyone and bringing kids back to school. 

Earlier this month, Dr Fauci said masking up at a widespread population level had less impact on quelling the Covid pandemic as scientists once believed. The statement was in answer to a study by an Oxford University researcher who concluded that masks did not help.

Dr Fauci said: ‘When you’re talking about the effect on the epidemic or the pandemic as a whole, the data are less strong.’

This led to a firestorm online with many calling Dr Fauci a ‘fraud’ and a ‘liar’. 

This, he has said, is just a reflection of constantly learning more about the virus, how it spreads, and how it harms the body. 

Last fall, Dr Fauci admitted that some of the social distancing measures put into place during his stint in the Trump White House were ‘draconian’ and inflicted unnecessary harm on the economy as well as children. 

He said: ‘Of course, when you make recommendations, if the primary goal when you’re dealing with a situation where the hospitals were being overrun in New York, intensive care units were being put in hallways, you have to do something that’s rather draconian. 

‘And sometimes when you do draconian things, it has collateral negative consequences, just like when you shut things down, even temporarily, it does have deleterious consequences on the economy, on the schoolchildren. You know that.’