Christine Grady, a senior bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health who is married to Dr. Anthony Fauci, was fired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Federal officials who were familiar with the most recent round of layoffs said that Grady was fired in part because she didn’t look into the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic started with a lab leak in Wuhan. A spokesperson for HHS told the media that the cut was part of a larger plan at NIH to focus less on getting ready for pandemics and more on more immediate issues.
Grady wasn’t the only bioethicist who was fired. Her work looks at how likely it is that future pandemics will happen. Others were given jobs in Alaska, Montana, Minnesota, or other remote areas that were hundreds or even thousands of miles from where they lived. It’s not clear if Grady was also given a similar offer.
While Grady’s coworkers praised her work, they also knew that her marriage to Fauci—a political opponent of President Trump—made it harder for her to stay 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 cover-up 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.”
