Taubenberger, who was quietly installed in April 2025 as Fauci’s successor amid the Trump administration’s overhaul of the federal health bureaucracy,reportedlyleft his post about two weeks ago.
The departure was publicly confirmed on Thursday during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on the NIH’s 2027 budget when Sen. Tammy Baldwin noted that Taubenberger would not be testifying as planned.
The move comes as part of a sweeping leadership purge at NIAID, whereeight of the top ten officialshave now been pushed out or reassigned since President Trump took office.
Despite that, Taubenberger’s departure doesn’t appear to be the typical voluntary retirement or bureaucratic shuffle.
Taubenberger’s ouster is more likely the direct result of relentless pressure on the agency, or worse, a cover-up.
No group has been more vocal, or more effective, in demanding Taubenberger’s removal than the White Coat Waste Project (WCW), the taxpayer watchdog organization famous for exposing Fauci’s beagle torture scandals and Wuhan lab funding.
WCW has been hammering Taubenberger’s appointment as a disastrous “vetting failure” since it was announced in late April of last year, just weeks after the Trump team began cleaning house at NIH.
WCW President Anthony Bellotti laid out the damning case in a powerful op-ed for American Greatness on May 1 titled “Fauci’s Lab Leak Henchmen Are Finally Facing Accountability.”
Bellotti detailed how Taubenberger, a longtime Fauci insider and intramural researcher at NIAID since 2006, was not just a passive holdover but an active participant in the COVID lab-leak cover-up machine.
Taubenberger, according to Belotti, co-led efforts with indicted Fauci aide David Morens to undermine Trump’s 2020 ban on gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
