Christine Grady underwrote Zika ethics rules. Her husband broke them. Together, they cashed the checks. Her silence wasn’t neutrality—it was complicity.

Christine Grady, HHS chief of bioethics (now retired, unless she chooses Alaska), and her husband, Dr. Anthony Fauci at NIAID, were central figures during the Zika virus controversy. Grady helped shape ethical guidelines, underlying those for a potential Zika vaccine, while Fauci disregarded them—most notably a 2017 ethics panel ruling against human challenge trials. Her silence during this breach raises questions about her role as the nation’s chief bioethicist.

Under their watch, NIAID willfully ignored a 2017 ethics panel ruling against Zika human challenge trials, pushing forward with experiments that Brazil rejected and that are now ongoing in Baltimore. An additional scandal lies in how the hastily-presumed Zika-microcephaly link became a global crisis in the first place: a fear-driven panic, fanned by Brazil’s media/left (using Zika’s microcephaly threat as a lever to Brazil’s overturning abortion-constraints)—and where Fauci, in particular, aggrandized the threat while dismissing counterevidence.

It’s time to rebuke, reformulate, and regret the Zika narrative. The Zika panic was a fear-driven mirage; yet, the moment a Zika vaccine gets WHO approval, billions will take it and billions (of $$) will be made; year after year, “forever.” And when no cases arise, the comfy Big Pharma/Big Public Health regulatorily-captured mutual appreciation society will claim success.

“Zika-Microcephaly has disappeared,” they’ll say, “because of the vaccine.” Only this time, the cost will not have been a joke—it’ll be global, permanent, and paid in trust, not just dollars. And no one will admit Zika Microcephaly had been but a paper tiger.