On a 2020 email chain over Anthony Fauci’s nomination for the Dan David Prize, one line stands out for who typed it. Greg Folkers, Fauci’s chief of staff at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told colleagues the draft needed work: “Need to beef up the covid part.” The prize carried a purse of $1 million, payable to Fauci personally. The man sharpening the case for it drew a federal salary.

That email is one line in 1,141 pages of Fauci’s private diary and personal correspondence that Senator Rand Paul released across late July, drawn from a records cache his office had worked through for months. Paul published the prize-money file, titled “Fauci’s Side Hustle,” on July 24. Five days later Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under subpoena and invoked his Fifth Amendment right 111 times, declining to answer a single question.

The nomination Folkers wanted to beef up came from Charles Dinarello, a professor of medicine and immunology at the University of Colorado who put Fauci forward for the Dan David Prize’s public-health category in 2020. Dinarello later acknowledged that Fauci and his staff had done “most of the work” on the submission he signed. Fauci won. Dinarello, who had drawn $12.2 million from NIAID as a principal investigator since 1985, received roughly $1.8 million more from the institute Fauci ran after the nomination went in.

The shape repeats with Barton Haynes of Duke University’s Human Vaccine Institute. In 2018 Haynes nominated Fauci for the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine, worth $1.2 million; Fauci then asked him to submit a nomination for the $250,000 Heinz Award. Fauci left little doubt about who would build the case: “As usual, I will supply all of the material.” Haynes had already taken more than $100 million from NIAID before 2019. After the nominations, he drew more than $282 million in NIAID research funds as a project lead on vaccine programs, part of a career total from the institute that exceeds $698 million. Folkers, the taxpayer-funded chief of staff, coordinated the paperwork on both.

Here is what the emails establish. A sitting federal official had government staff draft and polish nominations for cash prizes that paid him personally, and two of the scientists who signed those nominations later drew large sums from his agency. Here is what they do not establish: that the grants were payment for the nominations. Paul put it as a question, not a finding, saying the records “raise the obvious question of a quid pro quo given the large amount of prize money at hand.” The drafting and the timing are on the record. The causation is not, and no email in the release closes that gap.

Set the grants aside and a problem remains. A federal employee, at the time among the highest-paid people in the government, had his official staff spend official hours assembling award submissions that paid him privately. That is an accountability question whether or not a single grant dollar ever moved because of it. NIH has offered no public account of whether any ethics official reviewed the arrangement before the prize money changed hands.

The prize file is not the only place the private record and the public account diverge. On January 31, 2020, by his own entry, Fauci was told by leading virologists that the new coronavirus’s furin cleavage site raised serious doubts about a natural origin, with about half the scientists on the call believing the genome looked “constructed.” For the next two years he told Congress and the public that the science pointed to nature and that the lab-leak idea was fringe. The diary does not soften the contradiction. It dates it, in his own hand, before the public certainty began.

Fauci has not answered the prize-money question; on Wednesday he declined to answer any of it. NIH has not explained how a director’s chief of staff came to spend government time drafting award nominations that paid his boss, nor whether any ethics official signed off before the checks cleared. The full award files, the internal ethics correspondence, and the grant-review records that would show whether those funding decisions turned on merit or on something else sit where they have sat: inside the agency, and now with the committee that holds the subpoena. The records are on the table. The committee that put them there has not yet made anyone answer for them.

Sources

  1. Senator Rand Paul – The Reading Room (Fauci diary and “Fauci’s Side Hustle” prize-money release, July 2026)
  2. Washington Examiner – Scientists who nominated Fauci for prize money received millions in NIAID funding
  3. The New York Sun – Fauci solicited nominations for a $1 million prize from NIH-funded scientists, emails show
  4. NPR – Fauci invokes the Fifth Amendment at Rand Paul’s Senate hearing
  5. NPR – Rand Paul releases Fauci’s pandemic-era diary: lab-leak origin doubts, January 2020
  6. STAT – Fauci pleads the Fifth, criticizes Rand Paul at Senate hearing