Cashing in on Covid: Anthony Fauci is charging up to $100K for an HOUR of ‘motivational speaking’

Dr Anthony Fauci is charging sky-high fees for speaking engagements as the controversial figure reaps the rewards of his pandemic-era fame.

The former White House Covid doctor commands between $50,000 and $100,000 for up to an hour’s work, according to a listing on the website for the agency Leading Motivational Speakers that has since been scrubbed. 

Despite his huge fee, Fauci is scheduled to give the commencement address to the Yale School of Medicine on May 22 – though it is unclear how much the college is paying him.

The 81-year-old recently retired from his post as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where he had been receiving the highest salary of all government employees at more than $480,000 annually, more than what the President makes.

Dr Fauci – whose net worth is estimated at more than $12 million – became a highly divisive figure during his pandemic response. Critics slammed him for exaggerating the effectiveness of vaccines to boost uptake, flip-flopping on face masks and pushing for lockdowns.

Dr Fauci’s speaking fees were available on Leading Motivational Speakers as recently as Monday.

But there was outrage on social media when a staffer for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tweeted a screenshot of the listing with the caption: ‘SERIOUSLY???’

His information appears to have been removed, with a search for his name on the site now yielding no results

Substack journalist Jordan Schachtel criticized the listing on Twitter, writing:  ‘Follow The Science… Starting at 50k an hour.’

Meanwhile, former Trump campaign staffer Kingsley Cortes wrote: ‘The gift that keeps on grifting.’

 Dr Fauci was initially a revered figure and widely cited infectious disease expert — seen as a safe pair of hands in the face of a new, unknown pathogen and dubbed ‘America’s doctor’. 

But his credibility has taken a hit since the height of the pandemic.

Among his most notable mistakes during the pandemic was an early recommendation to the public against wearing masks in public places, saying they had little benefit. 

He later admitted downplaying masks so that Americans did not rush to buy them and risk a shortage for healthcare workers. 

Dr Fauci was also a key orchestrator of widespread lockdowns throughout the pandemic. Countless businesses followed his guidance and were forced to shut their doors in the spring of 2020.

When Omicron subvariant began to hit in November last year, Dr Fauci did not immediately rule out another lockdown, saying at the time that Americans had to be willing to do ‘anything and everything’ to fight it.

And millions of Americans were turned off by his perceived arrogance when he made statements like, ‘Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.’

He made a full-throated rebuke in 2020 of theories that Covid-19 had escaped or been purposely released from a lab in Wuhan, China where scientists had been tinkering with highly dangerous pathogens such as coronaviruses in a type of research called ‘gain of function.’

In April 2020 he dismissed the theory as a ‘shiny object that will go away’, and later brushed aside claims from other top experts as an ‘opinion’.

But he has since backtracked in the face of public scrutiny for not including perspectives outside of mainstream science. He said in July last year that he and fellow virologists ‘have an open mind’ to the lab leak theory, though ‘it looks very much like this was a natural occurrence.’

Dr Fauci’s net worth is estimated to have grown $5 million from 2019 through 2021, during the pandemic, according to a government watchdog group.