Anthony Fauci is appointed director of NIAID at age 43. He immediately becomes the dominant force in AIDS research funding. Researchers who challenge the HIV=AIDS orthodoxy — including Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis and UC Berkeley's Peter Duesberg — find themselves defunded and professionally destroyed. Duesberg's publication record, one of the most cited in virology, goes dark after he publishes his alternative hypothesis.

AZT is approved as the only permitted AIDS treatment. Fauci pushes high-dose protocols that researchers later document caused severe toxicity in patients already immunocompromised. Alternative treatments — including drugs showing promise in compassionate use — are blocked from trials. ACT UP protesters accuse Fauci of letting patients die to protect monopoly treatment. Some of those protesters later acknowledge Fauci eventually became an ally — but only after years of obstruction.

NIAID under Fauci awards grants to EcoHealth Alliance, led by Peter Daszak, for coronavirus research. Funding is routed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. When the Obama administration implements a moratorium on gain of function research in 2014, the WIV work continues — NIH later claims it didn't meet the definition. Internal documents released via FOIA suggest otherwise.

On February 1, 2020, Fauci holds a conference call with top virologists including Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, and Andrew Rambaut. Their private communications — released via FOIA — show they believed the virus showed signs of engineering. Within days, they co-author "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" in Nature Medicine, concluding natural origin. The scientists who wrote it subsequently received millions in NIH grant funding. Andersen's grant alone: $8.9 million.

The three signature COVID interventions Fauci championed — six-foot distancing, universal masking, and school closures — were all later acknowledged to lack robust scientific basis. Fauci's own staff admitted to Congress the six-foot rule "just appeared." His February 2020 email explicitly says masks don't work for the uninfected. The school closure data showing generational educational and psychological harm to children was available in real time and ignored.

Fauci designates remdesivir as standard of care for COVID hospitalization despite the WHO's own Solidarity Trial showing no mortality benefit. The drug costs over $3,000 per treatment course. Gilead Sciences, remdesivir's manufacturer, had financial relationships with researchers in Fauci's orbit. Generic alternatives showing comparable or superior outcomes in some studies received no comparable institutional support.

White Coat Waste Project uncovers via FOIA that NIAID under Fauci funded experiments in which beagle puppies were subjected to painful parasite studies, including sandflies allowed to feed on sedated dogs in mesh cages. Some experiments were conducted in Tunisia in ways that would be illegal in the US. Fauci's office initially denied funding the experiments. FOIA documents proved otherwise. A bipartisan letter signed by 24 members of Congress demanded answers.

Fauci retires from NIAID in December 2022 after 38 years as director and 54 years with the federal government. At retirement he is the highest-paid employee in the entire federal government at $480,654 — more than the President. Multiple perjury referrals have been submitted to the DOJ for his congressional testimony about gain of function funding. As of 2026, no charges have been filed.