NIH husband-wife team orchestrated pandemic mandates, says report

In a PBS documentary which premiered last week about former National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former official admits he was “wrong” about the COVID-19 mandates — not for orchestrating them, but for not forcing them sooner.

“Maybe I should have done that,” Fauci told Director Mark Mannucci in response to a question about whether he should have ordered mask mandates and quarantines earlier. “Yeah, I was wrong.” 

But the fault is not solely Fauci's. Earlier in the pandemic, mandates were frowned upon and even considered “dehumanizing” until they were stamped as ethical by Dr. Christine Grady, according to a report by Children’s Health Defense.

Grady is the chief bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which places her in charge of deciding whether the federal government’s health-related actions are ethical. She is also Fauci’s wife, which means that whenever Fauci would introduce a mandate — not matter how draconian — it was given the necessary go-ahead from Grady, who declared it morally sound.

Together, the couple decided the nation’s response to COVID-19, sometimes over dinner.

“[W]e’ve had conversations about the sort of consequences of telling people to stay home and what it would do for the economy,” Grady said in a November 2021 interview. “And there were a lot of people in those days that, and still who said, it’s ruining the economy. It’s much more important to just keep things going and not worry about transmitting virus. . . .

“I said, that one of the messages should be, how many lives are you willing to sacrifice? And that message would be pretty stark and pretty brutal, but that’s really what the trade-off was. . . . And so we’ve had that kind of conversation over dinner more than once, actually.”

Earlier in the pandemic, Grady even opposed some of the policies she would later stamp as ethical to pave the way for her husband’s mandates.

In a June 2020 presentation, for example, Grady said that vaccine passports could commit “discrimination without much overall gain.” But her view on the subject gradually shifted until she advocated for vaccine mandates, even co-authoring a paper in March 2022 which stated:

While some employers might understandably feel hesitant to pressure employees to get vaccinated, our analysis suggests that it is often ethically acceptable to inform, encourage, strongly encourage, incentivize, and subtly pressure unvaccinated people to benefit them, the organization, and other employees.

In April 2020 Grady acknowledged the emotional toll of forcing people to die in isolation:

Because of visiting policies and fear of contagion sometimes when somebody is really sick their family cannot visit them, they can’t see them. . . . [T]he stress and the sadness and the isolation on families is and is going to be great.

In November 2020 she said that such a “lonely kind of death” is “understandable”:

It’s a lonely kind of death, many institutions, understandably have visitor policies which either restrict the number of visitors to one or zero so sometimes people are dying without having their family nearby and that puts an additional burden on the healthcare staff.

It was Grady who apparently crafted the government’s messaging on the vaccine that “the benefits outweigh the risks”.

In 2020 she co-authored a paper that advocated for vaccines to be distributed under emergency use authorization — which the COVID vaccines ultimately were — and acknowledged that “[e]ven with mandated safety monitoring after EUA distribution, it would be difficult or impossible to ascertain vaccine-induced adverse events.”

However, by November 2021 she was justifying the COVID vaccine because “there is a balance between benefiting the public health now versus waiting for all the information we might get” — something impossible to know without that information.

Grady also backed her husband’s mask mandates, which she justified by saying that the individual must sacrifice for the collective. She also declared that masks “don’t really infringe on people’s freedoms very much” ignoring the fact that it is the mandate, not the mask, which violates freedom:

There’s a classic tension between public health, and individual interests and freedoms. Where there seems to be this conflict to the things that we do to protect the public health, and to protect the population for the common good. Sometimes they are perceived to be, and sometimes they do in small ways, infringe on people’s freedoms. There are principles of public health ethics that help you sort out the kinds of interventions that we should use: Things that are effective, that are proportional, where the benefits outweigh the risks that are necessary, that are least infringement possible, that are transparent, that we can publicly justify. . . .

What’s striking to me is that, the kinds of burdens that we’ve asked people to undertake, like putting on a mask, don’t really infringe on one’s freedoms very much. They’re low burden and they have an effect. They do protect the person who’s wearing the mask, as well as the people that are around them.”

During the pandemic, Fauci became the highest-paid federal employee, surpassing the president’s salary at $480,654 per year. Grady herself out-earned the vice president at $243,749. Children’s Health Defense estimates that when considering benefits, the husband-wife team cost taxpayers about $1 million per year.