(Republican Insider) – A new report from the folks at WND has revealed that over the course of a decade, the National Institutes of Health, which includes agency scientists and executives like Dr. Anthony Fauci, received a total of $350 million in royalty payments, all from third parties like pharmaceutical companies, according to an independent investigation which was able to get their hands on government documents thanks to a lawsuit.
The investigation was conducted by Adam Andrzejewski and his non-profit organization OpenTheBooks.com, which looked over the royalty payments for inventions by agency scientists between the fiscal years of 2010 and 2020.
The NIH granted a whopping $30 billion to roughly around 56,000 recipients, according to data found by OpenTheBooks.com, pointing out that the “largess of taxpayer money buys a lot of favor and clout within the scientific, research, and healthcare industries.”
The very lucrative royalty payments to scientists working for the NIH “could be a potential conflict of interest and needs disclosure,” the organization said.
“Andrzejewski said the NIH documents are heavily redacted, and only the number of payments each scientist received is disclosed along with the aggregate amount per NIH agency. The amount of the individual payments is blacked out,” the report said.
“Among the NIH leadership and top scientists receiving royalty payments are Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, the NIH director from 2009 to 2021,” WND’s report continued.
“Fauci, whose 2021 taxpayer-funded salary was $456,028, received 23 payments. Collins, whose salary that year was $203,500, got 14,” the report added. “And Clifford Lane, Fauci’s assistant, whose salary was $325,287 in 2021, received eight payments.”
Andrzejewski went on to say that it’s been a “struggle to get any useful information out of the agency on its royalty payments,” as the NIH acts as if these payments are a “state secret.”
The NIH, he said, “defied the federal Freedom of Information Act law and refused to even acknowledge our open records request for the royalty payments,” which was actually filed last September.
He then stated that the NIH also employed the use of expensive taxpayer-funded litigation to “slow-walk” disclosures concerning royalties, releasing the oldest ones first.
“While the agency admits to holding 3,000 pages, Andrzejewski said, it will take 10 months to produce them,” the report said. “Represented by Judicial Watch, OpenTheBooks.com sued NIH in federal court last October.”
“NIH is essentially telling you, the taxpayer, to pay up and shut up,” Andrzejewski explained. “They’ll run things. They have forgotten that they work on behalf of the American people.”
“He noted that in 2005, the Associated Press successfully used FOIA to reveal that 900 NIH scientists collected $9 million in royalties. The documents showed that 51 royalty recipients were working on experiments involving inventions for which they were already being paid,” WND reported.
Fauci was one of these 51 scientists and received $45,072.82 between the years of 1997 and 2004 for a patent license on an experimental treatment for the AIDS virus. NIH provided funding for that particular treatment to the tune of $36 million. That’s more than a little pocket change.
“In February 2021, Andrzejewski noted, Fauci received a $1 million prize from the Dan David Foundation in Israel for ‘speaking truth to power’ during the Trump administration,” the report stated.
“When a federal bureaucrat pops up on television giving us health instructions, who has paid them and for what research and technology?” Andrzejewski went on to ask. “When a patient agrees to a clinical trial or experimental treatment, what financial interests are involved?”
“NIH needs to come clean with the American people,” he said in conclusion, “and open the books on the line-by-line royalty payments to the agency and its scientists.”
Copyright 2022. RepublicanInsider.org
What has happened to the “Rule of Law” ? It is apparent that you can break the law without consequences if you are part of the govt. These people work for “US”, why are we allowing them to get away with this kind of garbage.
People working for federal agencies seem to thing that they do not work for and answer to the American people. They think the federal government pays them, when in fact the money comes from American citizens in the form of taxes.