Senator suggests plan to ax Fauci’s NIAID post
Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has proposed an amendment that would remove chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci from his role at the top of the public health pyramid. On Monday, the senator, who is also a trained physician, revealed a plan to split Fauci’s role as the head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) into three roles run by separate directors.
“This will create accountability and oversight into a taxpayer funded position that has largely abused its power, and has been responsible for many failures and misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic,” Paul wrote in a Fox News op-ed.
“We’ve learned a lot over the past two years,” the senator wrote, adding that the main lesson is that “no one person should be deemed ‘dictator-in-chief’.” His measure, Paul said, would “finally force accountability and fire Dr. Fauci.”
Under Paul’s plan, the three smaller national research institutes would be the National Institute of Allergic Diseases, the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the National Institute of Immunologic diseases – and each would have their own director.
To prevent abuses of power, those directors would be appointed by the president and serve out a five-year term.
Paul tore into Fauci personally in the oped, saying that in all his years studying and practicing medicine, he has never encountered someone with the gall to proclaim himself “the science” and portray anyone opposing him as “attacking science.”
Fauci is the highest-paid US government employee whose salary is furnished by taxpayers, taking home a whopping $417,608 in 2019, according to Forbes. He and his wife also held over $10.4 million in investments at the end of 2020, financial disclosures revealed.
Paul and Fauci have squared off repeatedly during the pandemic, with the senator accusing the lifetime public health bureaucrat of lying to congress by denying that the National Institutes of Health paid for gain-of-function research at the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Fauci has accused Paul of attempting to implicate him in the origins of Covid-19 itself, which Paul said is not his aim. The Kentucky senator has even referred the case to the Department of Justice – a gesture that seldom amounts to an actual court case.
With nearly a million Americans having died of Covid-19, President Joe Biden declared victory over the virus during his State of the Union address earlier this month, and the mask mandates and lockdowns that kept much of the world indoors for the last two years have all but disappeared. Arguing these measures did nothing to protect Americans, Paul blamed the fact that the science the government followed was “dictated by one man, an unelected bureaucrat with far too much power.”
