Church of Conspiracy: the Fauci Patents

As many have experienced, the COVID disinformation engine has jumped the shark. It has become nearly impossible to talk to friends and relatives about medicine and science. Those categories have been replaced with the mislabeling of “politics,” which is bizarre when the state of scientific knowledge remains unchanged whether we are standing among Democrats and Republicans in the US, or in a completely different political landscape in Europe or Asia. I’ve tried to engage and generally met with failure. The experience has been oddly similar to interfacing with young-earth creationists. The disinformation crowd has gone full fundamentalist, mingling misunderstanding with belligerence and brimstone.

This article is an adaptation from an email I sent to some of the anti-vaxxers I know. That dialogue has been long and unhappy, and it has since lapsed. But I was encouraged by others to post some of the content (of which there is a great deal), in the hopes that it might help a reader or two. I’m not sure how much energy I will assign to this effort, but at the least, I’ll put forward this installment…

The Claim

I was recently talking to someone who said that Fauci owned one or more COVID vaccine patents, and that he was directly profiting from the COVID vaccines. They went on with fervor to say that Fauci is a bad person; he is a fraud; and he should be in prison. Thus, the overall story included both fact assertions and character judgments.

The Online Rumor

As a rule, conspiracy generators are unoriginal and procedurally lazy. They do not typically engage in serious study or data collection. I found that different rumors of this sort have been circulating since 2020; it is a fairly well-worn trope of the anti-vax and conspiracy-theory crowds. It changes shape and attaches itself to one pharmaceutical product and then another, but the major lines are generally the same.

This Newsweek article includes a more recent mention related to RFK Jr., who has been advancing the patent related rumor.

Key Question

Stories can garner widespread support among readers for various reasons. The popularity of any tale always indicates something. This story about Fauci exists and has spread fairly well. But why does this story exist and spread?

For any conspiracy theory, we can minimally ask the following two-part question:

• Is there real evidence that this story is true, such that people should believe it?
• Or do people want to believe it, whether they have evidence or not?

Two Paths

There are two ways that any story can be evaluated. The first is to “outsource” the checking to a third party. Referring to the fact checkers is generally a good first step and can give readers a basic sense of the various claims. But make no mistake: fact checkers are a secondary source. The original article we want to evaluate is itself usually a secondary source too.

This can lead to “your source” vs “my source” claims in discussions. Some folks despair of the apparent subjectivity; others relish in claiming false equivalence for their favored tales. But as will become apparent later, there are real, objective ways out of this sand trap – by doing more work and going to primary sources.

Checking with the Fact Checkers

Nonetheless, I’ll start with consumer-oriented fact checks. The Newsweek article discusses responses from Fauci and the NIH:

…while the National Institute of Health has said that it is seeking patents related to work done by its scientists that contributed to the development of the Moderna vaccine, any resulting patents would belong to the agency—not Fauci… 

The situation NIH describes would be normal, because Fauci is an employee of the government. Government employees ritually sign over their intellectual property rights. Here is another, blunt fact check of the claim from The Dispatch. And this one from Reuters has even more information.

Primary Sources

While these articles were easy to find, I personally did not settle for anyone else’s commentary. As mentioned, such articles are secondary sources. Instead, I went to the primary source. I looked up the patents with Fauci’s name using the publicly available US Patent Office website.

These are the patents that mention Anthony Fauci:

• Patent 5,696,079, 1997
• Patent 6,190,656, 2001
• Patent 6,548,055, 2003
• Patent 6,911,527, 2005
• Patent 7,368,114, 2008
• Patent 9,193,790, 2015
• Patent 9,441,041, 2017
• Patent 9,896,509, 2018

The entries look like this:

Many of these pertain to AIDS. Some mention mRNA. It is not clear to me whether any of them could/would be used in the current vaccines; subject matter expertise would be required to answer that question. It is possible that the current vaccine patents are still pending and not actually finalized, since none of these date to 2020/21. But here is the material point: the assignee (i.e., the owner) of all these patents is the US government, not a private individual or company:  

The United States of America as represented by the Department of Health and Human Services

Here is an example:

Speaking from personal experience, I am listed as an inventor on multiple patents. But I do not make money off of those patents, because I am not the assignee. Those patents belong to the people who paid for the development efforts. Likewise, we would not expect Fauci to make money from these patents, because he does not own them. He is merely an inventor. This is exactly per expectation for a federal employee, and per the statement of the Newsweek piece. Employers almost always own the rights to any inventions and patents that employees generate.

The failure to understand the difference between the inventor and the assignee is a classic category error. Perhaps the people who are circulating this rumor don’t know the difference. Perhaps they simply relish conspiracies more than they want facts. 

Bottom Line

This story about Fauci appears to be a rumor.

Perhaps one day we will find out that Fauci really was corrupt. That there really were back room deals and ill-gotten gains. That he was willing to trade his entire legacy for riches, at the age of 80, when he could not hope to spend them. Perhaps.

But given the actual information we have in hand today, there does not appear to be any real evidence for this rumor. I wish people did not buy into mere tales so easily, and that they would make the small obligatory effort to fact-check what they read. If they did so, they would be wrong far less often. At a cognitive level, belief in rumors points to gullibility – a weak mental filter for vetting information. But we must go beyond the thought dimension and get down to the emotions involved.

Believing and broadcasting such tales says something about the believer. They want it to be true. They want to believe it in the absence of any compelling evidence. They take the story on faith. Faith means believing and asserting things as true without supporting evidence. The unevidenced assertions about Fauci in this case are faith claims in the Church of Conspiracy. As in other faith communities, various beliefs are asserted well ahead of the evidence. And good luck to anyone attempting to reason against articles of faith.