Even after he exits federal employment, Fauci will still earn a large salary, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. He is currently the highest-paid federal official, making more money than the president, military generals, and even Cabinet officials. His salary in 2020 was $434,000, thought he likely made more in 2021 and 2022. According to Open the Books, an oversight and transparency organization, Fauci will be entitled to a pension that yields roughly 80 percent of his salary, so at least $350,000 per year.
Of course, Fauci will be able to make much more money than that. He will surely write books and give speeches. Indeed, the doctor is well-positioned to capitalize on his newfound fame as a hero to Team Blue. No public official, not even President Joe Biden himself, personifies the U.S. government’s pandemic approach quite like Fauci, who quite deliberately positioned himself as the avatar of correct COVID-19 behavior. Fauci even said that critics who undermined him were attacking science itself.
These critics have grown more numerous over the course of the pandemic as Fauci’s miscalculations became more evident. He has confessed to telling nobles lies—to giving the public information he thought was wrong in order to serve some other goal. He downplayed the effectiveness of masks, purportedly out of concern that there wouldn’t be enough of them for hospitals. He also told the public that the herd immunity threshold was lower than his actual mental estimation; in the end, neither figure was accurate, since COVID-19 is able to evade both infection-acquired and immunity-acquired protection.
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