Christine Grady, a top bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health and the wife of former top NIH official Anthony Fauci, was among the health bureaucrats who received a layoff notice on Tuesday, according to news reports.
Grady was given the boot as part of the post-pandemic restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), according to the New York Times and STAT News. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his top aides have said the layoffs are aimed at consolidating administrative functions and overhauling a failed status quo in Americans’ health.
Some NIH leaders were given the option of transferring to one of the field offices of the Indian Health Service in Alaska, Montana, Minnesota, and other locations far removed from Washington, DC. But it’s not clear whether Grady was among the officials given the option of taking up a remote post hundreds of miles from the couple’s tony Beltway neighborhood. The couple had a net worth of $11.5 million by the time of Fauci’s 2022 retirement, according to federal disclosures, a $7.6 million jump from before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Open The Books.
Even an NIH official who described Grady as well respected acknowledged that her marriage to Fauci impacted the ability of the institutes to tackle ethical questions that risked reflecting poorly on the former White House medical advisor.
An NIH official speaking on the condition of anonymity told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Grady was “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.”
“That’s something Christine Grady could have, or should have, done,” the official continued. “She wasn’t able to do it because she was Fauci’s wife.”
“Maybe they had discussions in private about what was going on,” the official said. “She was placed in a conflicted role because of that.”
Other NIH officials in Fauci’s inner circle were also let go.
Clifford Lane, who had worked at Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1991 — most recently as deputy director of clinical research and special projects — was also let go, according to the New York Times.
NIAID Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Director Emily Erbelding has also been let go, according to Government Executive. Erbelding was involved in communications with Fauci and with EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak about the connection between the NIAID and high-risk virology in Wuhan, China, in 2020 according to emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know through the Freedom of Information Act and a congressional investigation.
Emailed requests for comment to Grady, Lane and Erbelding received no immediate response. A phone call to the NIH Department of Ethics was answered but abruptly ended when the receptionist learned this reporter was calling.
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