We Americans have gotten to know more than we ever wanted to about Dr. Anthony Fauci, the smug, short-statured man who became the face of the government's COVID response. We'll not soon forget him lecturing us about masks, pushing vaccines and social distancing on us, and advocating for all sorts of draconian measures meant for the "greater good" of society.
"Two weeks to slow the spread" – remember that old chestnut? That worked out great.
Fauci has been in the news quite a bit lately because he was subpoenaed to appear in front of a Senate committee – finally, we'd get some answers! As we now know, Anthony Fauci didn't, and was never going to, answer for his actions. His silence was problematic for Sen. Rand Paul, who led the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to vote Thursday in favor of holding Fauci in contempt of Congress.
Faced with possible criminal charges by the DOJ, Fauci was photographed after the vote looking downright glum. A photographer caught him and his wife, Christine Grady, futzing around their home in Washington, D.C., and the pair eventually left in their car.
Here's what the photographer saw:
Fauci's fed-up wife flips the bird as ex-top doc miserably takes out trash hours after contempt vote https://t.co/x36ggvsh9O pic.twitter.com/d9HpRUfetj
— New York Post (@nypost) August 6, 2026
The delightful Mrs. Fauci gave the world a one-finger salute, and really, she's been doing that for quite a while now.
It turns out that Grady wasn't merely standing quietly by her man in the background while her husband became the patron saint of the COVID scolds. Grady was herself a prominent bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, where she served as chief of the Department of Bioethics, and she had plenty to say about what we Americans ought to be doing during the pandemic.
During a July 2020 interview, Grady was asked about the increasingly contentious debate over masks. "Masks shouldn't be divisive," she said, adding that "everybody should do it" for public health reasons.
As for those pesky Americans who were concerned about preserving individual liberty? Grady said no big, arguing that masks didn't restrict liberty all that much compared to the public-health benefits.
Ah, yes. Nothing says "bioethics" quite like an unelected government bureaucrat deciding how much liberty you're really going to miss.
Can you imagine the dinner conversations at the Fauci homestead?
In 2022, Grady co-authored an academic paper bearing the harmless title, "The ethics of encouraging employees to get the COVID-19 vaccination."" "Encouraging" was doing some heavy lifting there. In parts of the country, government officials actively urging neighbors to snitch on each other if they caught someone standing too close to another person or not wearing a mask.
Grady and her co-authors concluded that employers should "inform, encourage, strongly encourage, incentivize, and even subtly pressure" employees into getting vaccinated. They even suggested that businesses should publicize vaccination rates in ways that might "implicitly embarrass vaccine resistors."
Lovely.
For anyone who remembers the COVID years, "subtly pressure" probably sounds fairly well-meaning. It wasn't. Lose access to things. Get hassled at work. Have your coworkers turn on you. Maybe get reassigned because you won't take the shot. Maybe get fired.
But don't worry, you all. It's subtle.
The paper said there could be situations in which unvaccinated employees "must be reassigned to different tasks" if their refusal led to coworkers or customers being endangered. At the same time, the authors insisted workers had to remain capable of saying no without consequences serious enough to cross their line into outright coercion.
That's the distinction, apparently: Pressure people, embarrass them, incentivize them, strongly encourage them, and perhaps move them out of their jobs — just don't call it "coercion."
And then there's Grady's more recent thinking on "civility." Yes, the woman willing to flip the bird at a moment's notice thinks she's an expert on civility.
In a 2025 NIH oral history, she lamented skepticism shown by Americans toward science and institutions and suggested bioethicists could help show Americans how to disagree.
"We can be a model for how you can have debates and disagreement with civility and without demonizing the people who disagree with you," she said.
Beautiful sentiment, just one she refuses to live by herself.
For millions of Americans who spent the COVID years being told to mask up, get the shot, stay home, follow the rules, trust the experts, and put aside worries about personal liberties being violated, it's difficult not to appreciate the hypocrisy of this woman.
After years of telling everybody else how to behave, Mrs. Fauci finally found a mandate she herself couldn't follow: Be civil.
