Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a newly disclosed interview that he signed off on thousands of grants without reviewing them.
“I sign off on each … but I don’t see the grants and what they are. I never look at what grants are there,” Dr. Fauci told the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. “It’s just somebody at the end of the council where they’re all finished and they go, ‘Here,’ and you sign it.”
Dr. Fauci, 83, was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to late 2022.
Grant proposals first go to a group of peers. If they pass through that group, they are received by the NIAID’s National Advisory Council.
Dr. David Morens, one of Dr. Fauci’s top advisers while he was in the government, had written in an email that “Tony doesn’t maintain awareness of these things and doesn’t know unless program officers tell him, which they rarely do.”
“We have very highly trained subject matter experts at the program level that look at the grants and monitor the grants. Dr. Fauci told the subcommittee. ”It would be physically impossible for me to get into and look at every grant.”
Hellbound and Down 