Friday Funnies: People Will Die!

Fauci's pathos

Aug 07, 2026

Bioethics, Fauci Style

Well, this is rather perfect.

Christine Grady, Anthony Fauci’s wife and one of the most powerful bioethicists in the United States for nearly three decades, apparently has a new method for communicating with the American public.

She flips them off.

On Thursday, hours after the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8-5 to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress, Fauci emerged from his $2.4 million Washington home looking decidedly unhappy and wheeled the recycling to the curb.

It had been a rough day.

Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times during congressional questioning. The committee then voted along party lines to hold him in contempt.

Then came Mrs. Fauci.

Fauci climbed into the passenger seat of a vehicle driven by Grady. As they pulled away, the NY Post photographer outside their home received an unmistakable one-finger salute from the former chief of the NIH Clinical Center’s Department of Bioethics.

Yes. Bioethics.

You really cannot make this stuff up.

Grady is not some obscure academic who happened to marry a government bureaucrat. She began working at NIH in 1983, joined its Department of Bioethics when it was created in 1996, became chief in 2012, and spent decades writing and lecturing about informed consent, human-subject protections, vulnerability and research ethics. She also served seven years on the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

All while married to Anthony Fauci, who ran NIAID from 1984 through 2022 and became arguably the most powerful public-health bureaucrat in America.

To be precise, Grady did not approve Fauci’s research protocols or clear his financial conflicts. NIH says she had no such authority.

Which raises the more interesting question.

Who did?

Fauci was a government inventor who received royalty payments. Yet under federal ethics rules, those government royalty payments are not, by themselves, legally considered a financial conflict of interest. NIH does concede that conducting research involving your own royalty-generating invention can create an apparent conflict requiring review.

Only Washington could construct an ethics system in which receiving money from an invention connected to your government work is not necessarily a financial conflict. It may merely look exactly like one.

And that leads to questions worth answering. Who wrote and approved those policies? What role, if any, did Grady or her bioethics department have in developing or defending them? Who reviewed Fauci’s royalty interests, and where are the recusals, waivers and conflict reviews?

There is another question worth pursuing. Fauci’s own journal documents that he had staff devoted to identifying prestigious prizes and awards for which he might qualify, including awards from institutions with financial relationships with NIH. If so, who authorized that use of federal staff, and were those relationships ever subjected to ethics review?

For decades, Washington had Anthony Fauci presiding over one enormous corner of the federal biomedical research establishment while his wife occupied one of the country’s most prestigious positions devoted to the ethics of biomedical research.

Nothing to see there.

And now, after her husband invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination 111 times rather than answer congressional questions, America’s longtime grande dame of bioethics apparently decided that the appropriate response to public scrutiny was to extend her middle finger toward a camera.

Rand Paul supplied the inevitable punchline:

“Is that how you plead the Fifth in sign language?”

At least this time, the communication from the Fauci household was remarkably clear.