Christine Grady is out. Once heralded as the nation’s chief bioethicist at HHS, she was quietly given the option of retirement or reassignment — Alaska, they said. She chose retirement. It should’ve come much earlier. Grady’s legacy isn’t in what she prevented but in what she allowed. While married to Anthony Fauci, she stood silently as he trampled the very ethical standards she helped write.
Zika, a mild dengue-like virus, was hyped into a global terror in 2016. A spike in microcephaly — small head size in newborns — in Northeast Brazil was hastily blamed on it. Never mind that neighboring regions with identical mosquitoes, virus, and populations had no such spike. Or that Colombia, with over 100,000 Zika cases, recorded only 46 microcephaly births — versus Brazil’s 2,033. The numbers never made sense.
No matter. Fauci pounced. He pushed for a billion dollars in federal funds. Congress hesitated — partly over abortion concerns tied to Zika in Brazil — but eventually caved. Fauci funneled funds away from cancer, diabetes, and malaria, justifying it as an “emergency.” With the disease already fading, he faced a problem: how to test a vaccine when the virus had vanished?
His answer: create the outbreak himself. Inject people with Zika — human challenge trials.
In early 2017, an ethics panel — jointly convened by NIAID and Walter Reed — rejected the idea. Too risky. Unjustifiable. It wasn’t just any panel. Its conclusions rested heavily on Grady’s own 2001 paper on the ethics of infecting people for research. She’s cited 18 times in their 45-page ruling. Yet she said nothing when Fauci ignored it.
Brazil refused to host the challenge trials, despite being offered $100 million. ANVISA, Brazil’s FDA, said no. Undeterred, Fauci brought the trials back home. Johns Hopkins. Dr. Anna Durbin. Baltimore. Poor women in a poor city were deliberately infected with Zika for a disease that wasn’t even present.
The payoff? If a Zika vaccine is approved — even for a problem that doesn’t exist — it can be rolled out globally. A WHO listing means billions in revenue. Vaccinate every woman in the tropics, then every man too. Then travelers. Then, everyone. And if the disease stays gone? They’ll say the vaccine worked, just like my father, the “tiger catcher” of the Bronx. No tigers? See what a great job I’m doing.
Add to this: in 2017, the Gates Foundation gave $100 million to Moderna to make a Zika vaccine on the mRNA platform. That platform was the true prize all along. Zika was just the excuse.
Christine Grady knew. She co-authored the ethics framework that was violated, wrote the playbook, and then watched her husband burn it. When it came to the Zika vaccine push — or the COVID mandates later — she chose silence or complicity. Her ethics failed at home before they ever reached the public.
Now she’s gone. Fauci’s Zika legacy remains: a phantom threat, a billion-dollar diversion, and a shameful chapter in American bioethics.
Top 10 Quotations from Dr. Randall Bock:
- “Zika was a thing in Northeast Brazil, but it was a worry everywhere—thanks to fear and hype, not data.”
- “Microcephaly means a small head—but small doesn’t always mean defective.”
- “There was no increase in microcephaly over baseline—none.”
- “If Zika really caused microcephaly, we should’ve seen it in Colombia. We didn’t.”
- “Brazil said no to injecting women with Zika—even for $100 million.”
- “Fear-mongering is good business in public health.”
- “Dr. Fauci funneled money from cancer and diabetes to Zika—a disease already gone.”
- “The Zika vaccine was a solution in search of a problem.”
- “Christine Grady’s fingerprints were on the ethics panel. She did nothing to stop the violation.”
- “They’ll catch no tigers—and call it success.”