Journalist claims he was ‘canceled’ for investigating Fauci
A longtime Forbes contributor said on Monday that he was sacked from the magazine for his coverage of the financial dealings of Dr. Anthony Fauci, including a report on the White House chief medical advisor’s whopping $350,000 retirement package.
Adam Andrzejewski had been working with Forbes for the last eight years, coming up with more than 200 columns for the outlet.
But it’s the four pieces on Fauci last year that got him in trouble, the investigative journalist insisted in his appearance on Fox News.
“Clearly Forbes editors didn’t want our oversight of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s finances” and that’s the reason his column was “canceled,” Andrzejewski, who is also the CEO and founder of the website OpenTheBooks.com, told host Tucker Carlson.
According to the journalist, six top executives at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently sent him and a Forbes’ top content officer an email with complaints over his coverage.
“It was couched as a corrections email, but the corrections – there [were] basically no substantial corrections – and they quibbled about small things in my column,” he said.
In spite of all this, the letter became “the excuse that Forbes used to cancel the column.”
Within 24 hours after that email, he was contacted by his editor at Forbes, who told him that he was “barred from publishing on Anthony Fauci any longer,” Andrzejewski said.
The journalist reminded the audience that his pieces on the White House chief medical advisor, who became one of the most often-mentioned names in US media during the Covid-19 pandemic, were “tip of the spear” and garnered millions of views for Forbes.
Among other things, he revealed that Fauci was the highest-paid government employee in 2019. Fauci makes $456,000 annually, according to the journalist, which is more than US President Joe Biden, whose salary stands at $400,000 per year. Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady – who, incidentally, works as chief bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health – and Fauci himself made 1.7 million in 2020.
“So if you take their salaries, tack on the taxpayer-paid cost of federal benefits at 30 percent, the two Faucis, their household income, paid for by taxpayers every year is $900,000,” Andrzejewski said, estimating the net worth of the Fauci family at $10.4 million.
When contacted by the New York Post, Forbes spokesman Bill Hankes confirmed that Andrzejewski was no longer working with them. “Forbes regularly removes contributors who don’t meet our high editorial standards,” he explained, while pointing out the journalist’s previous columns of Fauci were still available on the magazine’s website.
The paper also featured Andrzejewski, who insisted that “today, if you are an independent voice, outside of the organs of state authority, you are in jeopardy. I am an example of this. My column at Forbes became an example of that.”
