You’ll Never Guess What Fauci Did Right After He Retired

 

“Hey, ChatGPT, what has Dr. Anthony Fauci been up to since retiring in December 2022?”

Sadly, ChatGPT did not give me the answer I was looking for: “Anthony Fauci has been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay with his cell mate Deborah Birx since January 1, 2023.”

Too bad.

Fauci has been doing what most bureaucrats do after retiring from a cushy government job after being in said job for decades. He started teaching. He joined Georgetown University as a distinguished university professor, and taught in both the School of Medicine and the McCourt School of Public Policy. He also participated in research and policy discussions. Hopefully said discussions were more fruitful and interesting than his recent “I take the Fifth 111 times” Congressional testimony. And of course, Fauci is much sought after by other schools, like the lectures he has given at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health (you know, the one heavily paid for by the Zuckerbergs).

He published the memoir On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service in 2024, reflecting on his career and experiences responding to HIV/AIDS, Ebola, COVID-19, and other public health challenges. It would be interesting to see how much of his diary overlaps with his book, but honestly, I can’t stomach reading either one.

And of course, he continues to be the star of the show, making countless media appearances. (Not so much lately, though, did you notice?) In fact, Fauci’s last big media blitz was in 2024, to promote his book. He did interviews with the usual suspects: CNN, NBC, CBS and PBS. After that, he mainly focused on lectures and professional meetings, which is interesting for a guy who so obsessively craved media attention. Was Fauci feeling the heat back in 2025? I think so-–the walls were closing in on him.

But wait, were they? After all, Biden issued Fauci’s pardon in January 2025, and it was a special pardon indeed. It is a preemptive federal pardon covering potential federal offenses during a specified period of his government service (specifically from January 1, 2014 to January 19, 2025, the day before Trump was inaugurated.

Fauci Feeling Fearless?

Fauci was the highest-paid government official. He clearly had a deal with Biden (or someone), given the never-ending-pardon granted to him later. Fauci felt fearless during COVID. After all, he successfully flipped scientists—who had previously sided with the lab leak theory—over to the “wet market bat soup” theory, AND got them to author the famous Proximal Origins paper. Of course, the $50 million in NIH grants he paid this “follow the science” foursome certainly helped change their minds.

If you think that was a bold move, you won’t believe what he did right after retirement. Hint: he didn’t take up a new hobby or anything like that. Sometime in 2023, Fauci became a science advisor for an obscure vaccine company.

This company started in 2022, so it truly was a startup, or so it appeared. The Vaccine Company (also called VaxCo) is based in the US and specializes in next-generation antigen engineering and…get this…in vivo nanoparticle (IVN) platforms. Nothing to see here.

It’s not unusual for a company to hire science advisors, but it is rare that a startup company would have enough funds—or enough connections– to hire someone of Fauci’s caliber, meaning a senior key opinion leader (KOL). More on those connections later.

Science advisors typically make $5,000 to $50,000 per year and are often paid very little in exchange for equity in the company that vests over 2 to 4 years. A typical equity deal might be a 1% ownership in the company. An advisor of Fauci’s caliber often makes $125,000 per year and negotiates equity, but that deal must be approved by the board. This was likely not an issue given this particular board of directors.

Fauci’s final federal salary when he retired was $480,654, making him one of the highest-paid federal civilian employees—or maybe the highest paid—at the time. Fauci also gets a pension, courtesy of us taxpayers, which several watchdog organizations, including OpenTheBooks, have estimated at $350,000 to $400,000 per year. Pensions usually begin shortly after retirement, so he has raked in this kind of dough for nearly four years now.

On top of that is royalty income shared between NIH and the inventor, and again, OpenTheBooks has told us that Fauci received 23 royalty payments between 2010 and 2021, but the actual dollar amounts were not disclosed. Add to all of this the Vaccine Company money, and Fauci is truly raking in the money.

By the way, since Fauci is a physician, he should be publicly disclosing payments from pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers as part of the U.S. Open Payments program. However, the database does not generally report equity in private companies or compensation from companies outside its reporting requirements. Either way, I doubt Fauci is reporting anything here.

His curriculum vitae does list his position in this company, and it’s ongoing. He is still advising.

The Most Fast-Tracked Company of All Time?

Natalie Winters did a great expose on the money trail of the Vaccine Company. Read it here, but in summary:

Fauci joined the company sometime in 2023, By September 2024, the company was awarded more than $28 million by the Biden administration to develop mRNA shots targeting viruses with pandemic potential. Founded in 2022. A multi-million contract in less than two years. You do that math. Hint: it doesn’t add up. This is very atypical for a startup company. This was the FIRST federal contract for the company. I feel pretty confident saying that most companies do not begin with a $28 million NIH grant. Typically, the entry level funding for NIH or NSF is around a $250,000 grant (capped at this amount until you prove you are a real company.) What is even stranger is that the $28 million was for vaccine candidate evaluation for flaviviruses (Dengue, Zika, West Nile, Yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, and Powassan). The award was given through the relatively new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) research program of course under the auspices of the NIH. The contract runs through 2029 and has the potential to increase to a $49 million award.

I mean, did Obama personally deliver pallets of cash on an airplane to The Vaccine Company?

It’s sounding that way.

It is estimated that the company has fewer than 50 employees. So let me get this straight. This company has a nearly $50 million 5-year grant AND is developing an EBV mRNA vaccine with a bare-bones crew? I don’t think so.

But here’s the scariest part of this ARPA-H grant. Rather than making one vaccine for dengue, another for Zika, etc., this grant research seeks to identify shared antigens—parts of the viruses that are conserved across many flaviviruses. If successful, the result would be a broad-spectrum (“pan-flavivirus”) vaccine, similar to the elusive universal influenza vaccine that so many are trying to develop.

This summer, Eli Lilly agreed to buy the company for up to $1.55 billion. Whether Fauci stands to profit remains intentionally hidden.

I mean, this is incredible! This is either THE most successful company of all time, or…

Who Else Is Involved?

The company was operating in stealth mode with very limited public information. There were several early red flags. The company had no online footprint—a death knell for any company in today’s digital world. And the company lists different locations (California, Maryland, and Massachusetts) in different business filings. This was enough to motivate Senator Joni Ernst to ask the new HHS Secretary RFK Jr. to investigate this company. Even more concerning to Ernst were two leadership (C-suite) roles, given that one was a top official in the Biden administration and the other was from Fauci’s former agency, NIH.

First up is Sonya Bernstein, listed as the company’s chief financial officer (CFO). Prior to this stint, Bernstein was a Biden White House COVID senior policy adviser and on the COVID Response Team. Prior to that she worked for Obama in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and later at HHS.

The company’s chief medical officer was listed as Julie Ledgerwood, a longtime NIAID vaccine official who worked directly for Fauci for 18 years as deputy director and chief medical officer of NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center. Incredibly, Ledgerwood also oversaw the NIH site participating in the first clinical trial of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine and the first human trial of the Ebola vaccine.

CEO Susan Silbermann’s resume reads like the Deep State CV that it is. She was a Pfizer exec for over 20 years and global president of emerging markets in 2018. She created Pfizer’s Global COVID-19 task force, and after leaving Pfizer in 2021 has served on several Big Pharma boards: Hillevax, the Chinese company Lianbio (now bankrupt), Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals (American-Irish) and IAVI, a biotech nonprofit focused on developing vaccines and antibodies for HIV, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases. IAVI? Isn’t that like GAVI but just with an “I”? Oh yes, and Silbermann was also on the boards of GAVI and Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard’s Defeating Malaria from Gene to Globe Initiative.

My God! This is unbelievable.

Eli Lilly’s Sinister Plan

Eli Lilly says its $1.5 billion acquisition of The Vaccine Company is part of its major strategic expansion into infectious disease vaccines. Lilly was an early distributor of the Salk polio vaccine in the 1950s, but shifted its focus away from vaccines. Until now.

Today, Eli Lilly is certainly not considered a major vaccine company. They have no (ZERO) human vaccines on the market. Instead, they focus on drugs for diabetes, cancer, neurological and immunological conditions. Wait a minute…most of these are side effects of the COVID jab. Lilly also makes obesity drugs (Mounjaro, Zepbound).

In addition to The Vaccine Company, Lilly also acquired two other companies, Curevo and LimmaTech Biologics. Curevo is developing yet another Shingles vaccine (why?) and is in Phase 2 clinical trials. LimmaTech is developing a Staphylococcus aureus vaccine and is in Phase 1 clinical trials.

The Vaccine Company is preclinical or Phase 1 ready. They haven’t conducted one clinical trial on one subject, and Eli Lilly paid $1.55 billion. It’s not unheard of for large pharma companies to acquire preclinical companies but if they do, they typically have one of two goals. The first is to acquire exceptional scientific talent. Fauci is NOT that, so cross that one off the list. Really, Eli Lilly is trying to acquire the mRNA platform before competitors do.

The Vaccine Company is developing a vaccine for Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), but so is everyone else–Moderna, Merck, BioNTech. No one has an approved vax yet, but Moderna is largely considered to be the frontrunner with its mRNA-1189 development. Even NIH has several vaccine candidates they’re working on with academic collaborators.

EBV infects about 90-95% of adults worldwide and has been linked to infectious mononucleosis, lymphoma cancers, and certain gastric and nasopharyngeal cancers. There is also strong epidemiologic evidence linking prior EBV infection to multiple sclerosis. Therefore, an EBV vaccine has a very large payoff (oh, and it benefits humanity as well.)

Thus the widespread interest.

 

So, What Are We Supposed to Make of All This?

Maybe the most important part of this story isn’t any single name, grant, vaccine, or acquisition. It’s the sequence.

Anthony Fauci leaves one of the most powerful positions in American public health. Shortly afterward, he becomes an adviser to a virtually unknown vaccine startup founded only the year before. Former government and vaccine-industry insiders occupy key positions. The young company receives a massive federal research award. Before producing an approved vaccine—or even establishing the kind of clinical track record one might expect from a billion-dollar biotechnology company—it attracts an acquisition deal worth as much as $1.55 billion.

Perhaps every piece of that story has an innocent explanation. Or perhaps it doesn’t. The story of The Vaccine Company may ultimately have perfectly ordinary explanations. If so, disclose the records and answer the questions.

Because public trust isn’t restored by telling people to stop looking.

What exactly was Fauci’s role? Was he compensated? How? Did he play a role in securing government funding, or that matter, securing the Big Pharma acquisition? Does he stand to benefit financially from Lilly’s acquisition?

These aren’t conspiracy theories. They’re questions, and Americans deserve answers.

After everything Americans endured during COVID—mandates, lockdowns, unprecedented government spending, enormous pharmaceutical profits, and repeated demands that the public simply “trust the science”, asking questions about the relationship between government officials, taxpayer-funded research, and private pharmaceutical companies should not be controversial.

Transparency should be the minimum requirement, and trust is restored by giving all of us “conspiracy theorists” nothing to find.