Fauci boasts about turning down a private sector job offer that pays $7 million a year

Dr. Anthony Fauci boasted in a recent interview that he turned down multi-million-dollar job offers from major corporations to maintain his position as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Fauci, 83, retired from NIAID in 2022 as the highest-paid government employee, earning $481,000 in his final year on the job, and his and his wife’s net worth was reported to be more than $11 million.

“So at the time that I was offered this… I was making $125,000, $200,000,” President Biden’s former chief medical adviser said in an interview on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” which will air in full on June 16.

“Then I was offered a job that would make me $5, $6, $7 million a year,” said the infectious disease expert.

Fauci pointed out that there were offers from the private sector from pharmaceutical companies and “private equity,” but he turned them all down because he believed his work in public health was “priceless.”

“(I) really felt that what I was doing had an impact on what I cared about, which was the health of the country and indirectly the health of the world, because the United States is such a leader in science, medicine and public health that what we do , indirectly spreads to the rest of the world,” he said. “And for me it’s priceless.”

Earlier this month, US taxpayer watchdog OpenTheBooks.com reported that the National Institutes of Health, including its scientists, received $710 million in royalties from drugmakers during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The NIH refuses to disclose the amount of royalties paid to each scientist.

Fauci claims he made “zero” of those dollars himself, even though scientists at his subagency NIAID pocketed $690 million of that cash.

He only confirmed that he received $122 in royalties for the monoclonal antibody he developed 27 years ago.

Fauci joined the Georgetown University faculty last year as a distinguished professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases at its School of Medicine.