"Dr. Fauci made out like a bandit"

Comment sent to this blog: 

"Fauci made out like a bandit devoting his life to serving the public. Not exactly Mother Theresa."

No. Not Mother Theresa. Just a pretty typical mission-driven professional.  

Anthony Fauci is a doctor. He worked full time until age 82. Of course he accumulated some money.

Anthony Fauci has critics. Elon Musk tweeted, "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci." Senator Rand Paul spars with him in senate hearings. A GOP House Committee has announced its plan to investigate him. Marjorie Taylor Green introduced H.R. 2316, titled the "Fire Fauci Act." You can buy tee shirts showing Fauci with devil horns.

Anthony Fauci draws criticism for being the highest paid U.S. government employee, $480,000 a year. Fauci's income does not surprise me. He is a physician in America. Governments retain physician employees by paying them what they might make working elsewhere, including in private practice. 

When I was a Jackson County Commissioner the Health Officer for the county was a physician. He was the highest paid county employee. We had to pay a competitive income. Fauci is a physician who supervises physicians, and he held the job for 38 years, which put him at the top of seniority step increases. Fauci's income would be a commonplace income for a physician in private practice in Medford, Oregon. Physicians with specialties that involve procedures make substantially more than this.

The comment quoted at the top of this page used the word "bandit." A Trump/MAGA/conservative meme is that Fauci's income was not just excessive. It was illegitimate and exploitive. The "bandit" accusation is odd and misplaced because Fauci was perfectly placed to cash in on his expertise, connections, credibility by quitting his job. He would be paid enormous sums to sit on the boards of drug companies, insurance companies, hedge funds, or virtually any board that wanted instant credibility heft. Fauci remained in his government job as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the most obvious of reasons. It wasn't money. He is a mission-driven professional doing work he considered important. We see this frequently among people who could retire, but choose to keep working, as lawyers, judges, professors, financial advisors. Their work is important to them. They are good at it and get satisfaction from it. 

The Fauci-as-bandit commenter linked to an article from the conservative magazine National Review that headlined that Fauci's net worth doubled during the pandemic, growing from $6 million to $12 million. The implication is that Fauci used the pandemic to get rich. There is another simpler explanation: A bull market for both stocks and Washington, D.C. homes. It does not surprise me that Fauci and his wife of 37 years accumulated $6 million dollars by Anthony Fauci's 80th birthday. His wife has a Ph.D. and is a department head at the National Institutes of Health. They fit a pattern of a two-income professional family, one of whom is a physician who kept right on working. He was earning a physician-level income for 50 years. Anyone in those circumstance would have accumulated money. Rising stock prices in 2020 and 2021, plus D.C. housing prices, would explain the expansion of their net worths since then. I have no reason to think Fauci reads this blog--I am sure he does not--but a year ago I said that technology stocks were overbought, that speculation was rampant, and a person should reduce risk and buy depressed oil stocks if one had not already done so. If Fauci had followed my suggestions his net worth would have more than doubled over the past three years.

Anthony Fauci represents exactly what one would expect from a public health official. His job was to  protect public health. The job of people in political roles is to balance public health interest against other interests. Trump and Biden each did such. People have every right to disagree with Fauci's recommendations. Maybe he was too earnest. Maybe he erred by caring more about the health of the vulnerable elderly than does the average American. Maybe, in hindsight, he was wrong on some things. It is easy to Monday-morning quarterback him.

But bandit?  I think not.