Dr. Anthony Fauci was elected as a fellow in the United Kingdom’s Royal Society, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, just days before he came under fire after the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic combed through emails from Dr. David Morens, his former longtime senior adviser.
The Royal Society nominated 90 researchers from around the world who “continue to push the boundaries of possibility in academic research and industry,” said President Sir Adrian Smith. Since the late 1600s, the Royal Society has recognized many prominent scientists, including Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, David Attenborough, and Elon Musk.
Newsweek reached out to the Royal Society and Georgetown University Medical Center, where Fauci holds a professorship, via email for comment on Friday.
Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and former Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden, is an immunologist with a long list of accolades accumulated over his career focusing on HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and most recently, COVID-19. In 2008, then-President George W. Bush awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has been awarded 62 honorary doctoral degrees from universities worldwide.
Since the 2020 coronavirus outbreak, which made Fauci a public figure and household name, he has come under increased scrutiny over mask and vaccine mandates and theories about the virus’ origin and subsequent alleged cover-ups.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, led by Republican Representative Brad Wenstrup, published a 35-page memo this week and said the emails from Morens raised “serious questions as to whether Dr. Fauci took part in a conspiracy amongst the highest levels of NIH [the National Institutes of Health] to hide official records related to the origins of COVID-19.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci in Washington, D.C., on December 9, 2022. The former NIAID director and former Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden was elected as a Royal Society Fellow on May 19.
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
According to a press release from the subcommittee, the memo “incriminates Dr. Morens in undermining the operations of the U.S. government, unlawfully deleting federal COVID-19 records, using a personal email to avoid the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and repeatedly acting unbecoming of a federal employee.”
Morens testified in front of the subcommittee Wednesday. Fauci is slated to testify on June 3.
Fauci’s election as a Royal Society fellow hasn’t been met with unanimous approval.
The Daily Sceptic, a British blog that has published misinformation about COVID vaccines, said in an article about Fauci’s fellowship that his “incautious scheming may have helped to unleash the pandemic in the first place,” referencing a COVID-19 origin theory that the virus originated from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, rather than through species-to-species transmission, a theory largely supported in the scientific community.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.