Christine Grady underwrote Zika ethics rules. Her husband broke them. Together, they cashed the checks. Her silence wasn’t neutrality—it was complicity.

Christine Grady, HHS chief of bioethics (now retired, unless she chooses Alaska), and her husband, Dr. Anthony Fauci at NIAID, were central figures during the Zika virus controversy. Grady helped shape ethical guidelines, underlying those for a potential Zika vaccine, while Fauci disregarded them—most notably a 2017 ethics panel ruling against human challenge trials. Her silence during this breach raises questions about her role as the nation’s chief bioethicist.

Under their watch, NIAID willfully ignored a 2017 ethics panel ruling against Zika human challenge trials, pushing forward with experiments that Brazil rejected and that are now ongoing in Baltimore. An additional scandal lies in how the hastily-presumed Zika-microcephaly link became a global crisis in the first place: a fear-driven panic, fanned by Brazil’s media/left (using Zika’s microcephaly threat as a lever to Brazil’s overturning abortion-constraints)—and where Fauci, in particular, aggrandized the threat while dismissing counterevidence.