If that name rings a bell it may be because Anthony Fauci has coincidentally made some very favorable remarks touting its effectiveness against the virus he’s made it his life’s work to keep us living in mortal terror of. Even though, according to all the actual data, it’s median fatality age is 80 and it’s basically harmless unless your old or already seriously ill.

Ballasy pointed out some remarks Fauci made on NBC News at the end of April that sounded almost like he could have been reading from a script for a remdesivir commercial.

The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.

Except, of course, a commercial would’ve been required to inform the public of any potential negative side effects. And Fauci skipped over that part.

Whether Fauci himself is getting any money from Gilead or any other company selling some drug his official backing has made vastly more profitable is something we don’t know.

As unbelievable as it sounds, Fauci doesn’t appear to be subject to the same stringent disclosure requirements governing the members of the NIH COVID Treatment Advisory Panel.

The fact that 8 members of the panel have financial ties to Gilead does, by itself, however, cast a suspicious light on the way Fauci starts sounding like Ronald McDonald discussing a Big Mac when remdesivir comes up.

It also raises very serious concerns about his efforts to discourage use of the much cheaper and, the evidence suggests, better alternative, hydroxychloroquine, which seem to include causing a lot of needless death by preventing people whose lives would have been saved from taking it.

If that surprises you, then you haven’t been following Dr. Fauci’s career very closely.

Before he supplanted Bill Nye as the left’s go-to science guy, Fauci was vilified by AIDS activists in the harshest possible terms for helping to block the use of cheap and effective drugs that could have saved thousands of lives.

He also managed to squeeze tens of billions of dollars out of congress by wildly exaggerating the threat of AIDS to fund his 40-year fruitless alternative search for a vaccine.

Sound familiar?

If you’ve any doubt about whether those AIDS activists were right to blame Fauci for killing thousands of Americans, here’s what the man himself had to say:

The gay groups said we were killing people with red tape. When the smoke cleared we realized that much of their criticism was absolutely valid.”

Being a high muckety muck in the federal bureaucracy certainly has its privileges. Resigning in disgrace or even a simple apology never appears to be necessary regardless of how disastrous your incompetence or corruption proves.

Even if your policies wind up killing thousands, you just eventually admit that the crowds cursing your very existence for the overwhelming stench of death you’ve caused might have a point.

Then, if you can just resist the temptation to pile on any more bodies for just a little while, voilà, like magic, the whole sorry episode becomes a résumé enhancer.

Before you know it, you’ll be given the chance to wreak havoc on an even grander scale when the next new virus rolls around.

As Steven Hatfill wrote last week in a shocking report on how Fauci’s history of strangling people with red tape has repeated itself with his push to promote remdesivir and block the cheaper and more effective treatment hydroxychloroquine provides:

Fauci continued to ignore the ever accumulating and remarkable early-use data on hydroxychloroquine and he became focused on a new antiviral compound named remdesivir. This was an experimental drug that had to be given intravenously every day for five days. It was never suitable for major widespread outpatient or at-home use as part of a national pandemic plan. We now know now that remdesivir has no effect on overall COVID patient mortality and it costs thousands of dollars per patient.

There are now 53 studies that show positive results of hydroxychloroquine in COVID infections. There are 14 global studies that show neutral or negative results — and 10 of them were of patients in very late stages of COVID-19, where no antiviral drug can be expected to have much effect. Of the remaining four studies, two come from the same University of Minnesota author. The other two are from the faulty Brazil paper, which should be retracted, and the fake Lancet paper [widely used by the media to falsely discredit hydroxychloroquine], which was.

Moreover, all of this is rendered even more troubling since, in addition to the financial ties between the NIH experts setting COVID treatment policies and the makers of remdesivir, Ballasy also reports that the U.S. government has bought virtually all of Gilead’s supply of the drug. 

Nor is remdesivir the only treatment Fauci is promoting sold by a firm to which members of his own agency’s treatment advisory group have financial ties.

Two other members list pharmaceutical giant Merck on the NIH disclosure form that Fauci somehow isn’t required to fill out.

And in another strange coincidence:

Merck is currently conducting clinical trials for a COVID-19 vaccine. Merck’s target date for a licensed COVID-19 vaccine is early 2021, according to recent congressional testimony.

If you try to research whether Fauci has a financial stake in any of the treatments he promotes, you’ll find a lot of articles “fact-checking” the claim that he does like the one at USA Today claiming:

The National Institutes of Health confirmed that Fauci… does not own stock in any biomedical or pharmaceutical companies.

Owning financial assets in pharmaceutical firms like Gilead would also be required to be publicly disclosed per the agency’s ethics policy.

The NIH also requires all employees to report any royalties they earn from their research.

In fact, it appears they instituted the latter requirement in part because, in 2005, John Solomon reported that Fauci had received “45,072.82 for an experimental AIDS treatment” while spending “$36 million in taxpayer money testing the treatment on patients in one experiment alone” without informing the patients of his financial stake.

Fauci claimed that he “originally refused to take the royalties but was told he legally had to accept them” but that he would henceforth “give every penny of it to charity … no matter what the yearly amount is.”

Sounds noble till you start to wonder who the mysterious people were who told him it was legally impossible to renounce his royalties and how on earth it could be true.

Or why he didn’t donate the money to charity as soon as he found out instead of waiting till after he was exposed.

And realize that he’s only talking about that one patent that John Solomon uncovered and there might be God-only-knows-how-many more.

And that there’s no way to know whether he even followed through.

Those fact-checking sites always conclude wind up saying that there’s no evidence Fauci is reaping any rewards from any companies selling treatments he’s used his considerable official power to make profitable.

But, given that it seems he only has to disclose outright ownership of a stake in the company or any royalties he’s getting, there’s also not a shred of evidence he’s not being enriched in any number of other ways.

Indeed, none of the financial arrangements between Fauci’s colleagues on the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Advisory Panel and Gilead or Merck involves owning a stake in the company or collecting royalties.

A couple of liberal watchdog groups are collecting signatures on petitions demanding that Fauci be forced to fully disclose any and all financial ties he has just like the members of the COVID Treatment-Advisory Panel must.

And, whatever one thinks of liberal watchdog groups in general, they certainly have a point here given the enormous power Fauci has, which he’s clearly not shy about using, to massively boost a pharmaceutical company’s return on investment.

The mere fact that Fauci hasn’t voluntarily surrendered the information is reason enough for suspicion.

And the financial ties people working for his own agency have to firms that sell drugs Fauci seems to be doing everything in his power to promote – even going so far as suppressing the use of life-saving treatments offered by competitors  – is another in the long list of reasons that someone with the power to issue indictments ought to be investigating exactly what motivated Anthony Fauci to spend the last five months using his considerable power to drive the nation into a completely unjustified panic that was certain to cause far more misery and death than it averted.

***

A concluding for anyone who thought the names of the two additional authors I cited sounded familiar:

Steven Hatfill, who wrote the RealClearPolitics expose’ on Fauci’s shameful efforts to stifle hydroxychloroquine, was in the news a lot from 2002 all the way through 2006. 

In fact, he got a $5.8 million settlement after suing the Justice Department for making him famous. 

Hatfill is the U.S. Army biodefense researcher Robert Mueller spent seven years relentlessly trying to pin the 2001 Anthrax attacks on. Mueller completely ignored the real culprit until the latter killed himself after Mueller finally noticed him and gave up the project of destroying an innocent man’s life – or at least that particular innocent man’s life, at any rate.

John Solomon, author of the 2005 expose’ on Fauci’s royalty payments, is one of the few mainstream journalists who’s doggedly worked to expose the Russian collusion hoax as well as Joe Biden’s Ukrainian corruption. We’d know much less about both if not for Solomon’s hard work.

He also founded Just The News, the site which published today’s report on Fauci’s NIH colleagues’ ties to Gilead and Merck.

Not only does history repeat itself, the cast of characters even seems to remain the same.