HHS fires pandemic architect

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) delivered a termination notice  to Christine Grady on Tuesday as part of a mass layoff of 20,000 employees.

Grady is the chief bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where she assesses whether the federal government’s health-related actions are ethical. She is also the wife of former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Anthony Fauci, which means that whenever Fauci would introduce a mandate — no matter how draconian — it was greenlit by Grady, who declared it morally sound. According to a report by Children’s Health Defense, mandates were frowned upon and even considered “dehumanizing” until they were stamped as ethical by Dr. Christine Grady.

Together, Grady and Fauci crafted 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.”

Vaccine mandates

Grady even stamped them as ethical certain policies she had opposed earlier in the pandemic as she moved to justify her husband’s mandates. In a June 2020 presentation, for example, Grady said that vaccine passports could lead to “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 that 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.

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 received — 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” — suggesting she was aware the vaccine might prove to be harmful.

Isolation

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 subjecting patients to 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.

Mask mandates

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:

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, pulling in $243,749. Together, the couple had a net worth of $11.5 million by the time Fauci retired in December 2022.

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