Paul titled the trove of documents “Fauci’s Side Hustle,” alleging he operated a prize-suggestion scheme that involved him authoring his own entries to various prize committees and having his colleagues in the scientific community submit them under their names.

For instance, in 2020, Dr. Charles Dinarello nominated Fauci for the Dan David Prize, then a $1 million award honoring laureates “who made outstanding contributions to humanity.” In one email chain published by Paul’s office, Dinarello alerted Fauci that “it’s submitted” and personally thanked him and his chief of staff, Greg Folkers, for “doing most of the work” with drafting the Dan David Prize submission.

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Dinarello, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, received roughly $1.8 million in NIAID grant money after he helped Fauci win the Dan David Prize.

“Each year the Dan David Prize committee asks me for nominees,” Dinarello wrote in the submission notification to Fauci’s staff, noting that he is “on a lot of Israeli lists” as a lifetime board member at the Weizmann Institute of Science, an Israel-based research center. The award itself is headquartered at Tel Aviv University, where the prize’s namesake, Israeli philanthropist Dan David, was a top donor.

In the lead-up to the submission deadline, Dinarello urged Folkers, “Please let me read the draft of the narrative.” Dinarello also advised that Folkers should “emphasize” NIAID’s co-development of the second mRNA vaccine for COVID-19. “It should be in the long narrative (He is writing this),” Dinarello said of Fauci.

“Need to beef up the covid part,” Folkers instructed other NIAID staffers the following day. Folkers attached a Word document containing the prepared nomination letter and asked, “Do u have language in the can […] that u could share that delineates how we responded in many ways to covid? I would tweak and fold a few key things into this.”

Fauci ended up clinching that year’s award in the category of “Public Health Present.”

“Congratulations….you’re rich!” an NIAID aide, who served as special assistant to the director, told Fauci in an email thread. “I want my 15%,” Folkers wrote separately.

Fauci appeared to return the favor a year later when Dinarello asked Fauci’s staff if Fauci could nominate him for the Shaw Prize, another seven-figure award worth $1.2 million.

“I thoroughly enjoyed Tony’s acceptance speech for the Dan David Prize and again I thank you for your essential role in the nomination process,” Dinarello wrote to Folkers in 2021. “Can you find out if Tony has been asked by the Shaw Prize committee to nominate someone[?]”

Fauci agreed to Dinarello’s request. “If Charles wants me to nominate him for the Shaw Prize,” Fauci told Folkers, “I would be happy to do so. He would have to write the nomination as he has done in the past.”

This dynamic played out between Fauci and other academics before the pandemic.

In 2018, Fauci repeatedly requested that Dr. Barton Haynes enter him in several prize contests and workshopped which ones he would be best suited for.

At the time, Haynes had nominated Fauci for the 2019 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine, a gold-plated Chinese medal made of 18-karat solid gold that is considered the “Nobel of the East.” It is unclear if Haynes put Fauci’s name forward at his behest, but the emails suggested some coordination between them.

“Here you go!” Haynes wrote, forwarding a confirmation receipt of his Shaw Prize submission. “Thanks, Bart,” replied Fauci. “There is another one that looks possible for me. As usual, I will supply all of the material. It is the Dan David Prize.”

“You bet!!!” Haynes responded. “Let’s do it.”

Fauci, however, realized that the Dan David Prize’s selected fields of study, which originally rotated annually to recognize achievements across disciplines, for that year were not related to science or medicine. “And so we will hold off on this until medicine/science returns as a theme,” Fauci told Haynes.

“Another possible award would be the Heinz Award,” floated Fauci, prodding Haynes to nominate him for the Human Condition category. Fauci indicated that his team would handle the submission paperwork for the Heinz Award, which pays out a cash prize of $250,000. All Haynes had to do was send his resume to the prize committee to become “a nominator” in the awards process.

“We obviously will take care of all of that on my end,” Fauci wrote. “The only minor glitch is that in order to nominate me you need to write to them, send your CV and indicate that you want to serve as a nominator. They do this because they do not want just anyone nominating anyone.”

“Yep, will do this straightaway,” Haynes said. “This is a good one, I think, for you.”

In 2020, Haynes also asked Fauci whether he should nominate him for the Shaw Prize again. “Have you won this yet?” Haynes wrote. “Want me to nominate you?” Fauci said he did not want the nomination.

Fauci has never won the Heinz Award or the Shaw Prize.

Haynes, the director of Duke University’s Human Vaccine Institute, was awarded over $282 million in NIAID research funds as the project lead on various vaccine development programs after nominating Fauci for the Shaw Prize in 2018.

Dinarello and Haynes, both longtime recipients of federal research grants, had regularly received research funding from NIAID prior to their prize submissions on Fauci’s behalf.

According to the agency’s grant repository, NIAID gave Dinarello a total of $12.2 million to support his research as the principal investigator on a series of immunology-related studies that date back to 1985. Haynes, meanwhile, has been awarded more than $698 million in grant money since 1987 by NIAID. A professor of medicine at Duke, Haynes led the university’s Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology, a consortium established by NIAID.

The records do not show Fauci outright offering Haynes or Dinarello additional NIAID funding in exchange for the prize submissions, but Paul argued the trading of nominations among scientists raises conflict-of-interest concerns.

Fauci, Haynes, and Dinarello did not respond to requests for comment.

In other instances of Fauci seeking monetary awards from outside organizations, NIAID’s ethics counsel concluded that he could not accept the cash prizes associated with awards bestowed by Vanderbilt University and the Georgia Institute of Technology because both sponsors of the prizes were NIAID grantees.

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“We did consider asking for an exception for these awards,” NIAID deputy ethics counselor Lawrence Tabak told Fauci. However, he said neither award was eligible for the ethical conduct exemption that allows gifts that “confer an exceptionally high honor in the fields of medicine or scientific research.”

Vanderbilt’s Nichols-Chancellor’s Medal is awarded “to those persons who define the 21st century and exemplify the best qualities of the human spirit.” Georgia Tech’s Prize for Social Courage “shines a light on those around the world who bravely act to improve the human condition, often in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.”