We’ve long suspected that U.S.
government agencies have deep conflicts of interest, and in recent days,
we’re finding these conflicts run deeper than most people imagined.
Government officials and employees are personally profiting on the
taxpayers’ dime, and as conflicts of interest have increased,
government’s transparency has decreased, making it more costly and
time-consuming to get to the bottom of it all.
Undisclosed Royalties Paid to Hundreds of Scientists
According to government watchdog Open the Books,1,2,3
the National Institutes of Health and hundreds of individual scientists
received an estimated $350 million in undisclosed royalties from third
parties, primarily drug companies, in the decade between 2010 and 2020.
The total amount is likely far greater, as four agencies have redacted
their royalty payments.
“Because those payments enrich the agency and its scientists, each
and every royalty payment could be a potential conflict of interest and
needs disclosure,” Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski writes.4 Why are these people getting paid? Open the Books explains:5
“The National Institute of Health [NIH], part of the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [DHHS], is the largest
biomedical research agency in the world. NIH grants over $32 billion in
funding to research institutions around the world, and employs thousands
of scientists to conduct research in-house.
When an NIH employee makes a discovery in their
official capacity, the NIH owns the rights to any resulting patent.
These patents are then licensed for commercial use to companies that
could use them to bring products to market. Employees are listed as
inventors on the patents and receive a share of the royalties obtained
through any licensing, or ‘technology transfer,’ of their inventions.
Essentially,
taxpayer money funding NIH research benefits researchers employed by NIH
because they are listed as patent inventors and therefore receive
royalty payments from licensees.”
Who’s Been Getting Rich on the Taxpayers’ Dime?
During a May 9, 2022, news conference with reporters, Andrzejewski
stated that payments issued between 2010 and 2014 accounted for 40% of
the total payouts.6 In all, 1,675 scientists received secret royalties during those years, with the average payout totaling $21,100 per person.
The five NIH employees — all of whom worked or work for the National
Cancer Institute (NCI) — who received the greatest number of payments
were Robert Gallo, Ira Pastan, Mikulas Popovic, Flossie Wong-Staal and
Mangalasseril Sarngadharan.7
In total, NCI employees received nearly $113 million between 2010 and
2014. The National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID) and its leadership received more than $9.3 million. According to
Andrzejewski:
“Francis Collins, the immediate past director of NIH,
received 14 payments. Dr. Anthony Fauci received 23 payments and his
deputy, Clifford Lane, received eight payments8 ...
With tens of billions of dollars in grant-making at
NIH and tens of millions of royalty dollars from third-party payers
flowing back into the agency each year, NIH needs to come clean with the
American people and open the books. We need to be able to follow the
money.9”
In 2005, the Associated Press investigated and reported on NIH
royalty payments, including details on who got what, and from whom. Many
of those details are now kept secret, even though the payments are
significantly larger, and thereby pose far greater risk in terms of
conflicts of interest. As noted in the British Medical Journal at the
time:10
“A patient advocacy group, the Alliance for Human
Research Protection, says that patients might have thought differently
about the risks of trial treatment if they knew of scientists' financial
interests.”
During a May 11, 2022, House Appropriations Committee subcommittee
hearing, Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., told acting director of the NIH,
Dr. Lawrence Tabak:11
“Right now, I think the NIH has a credibility problem
and this only feeds into this ... People in my district say, ‘Well,
so-and-so has a financial interest,’ or they don’t like ivermectin
because they aren’t benefitting from that royalty.
You may have very sound scientific reasons for
recommending a medicine or not, but the idea that people get a financial
benefit from certain research that’s been done and grants that were
awarded, that is, to me, the height of the appearance of a conflict of
interest.”
Tabak admitted the undisclosed royalty payments present “an appearance of a conflict of interest” and don’t appear ethical,12 but that the agency will not make recommendations on drugs based on anything other than the science.
Government’s Illegal Noncompliance Is Costly
Not only is the NIH database heavily redacted, but NIH financial
disclosure forms also help hide the payouts, as they define third-party
royalty payments as income received from the NIH.
When Open the Books initially filed a Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) request with the NIH to obtain this information, the NIH declined
to respond. Only after the watchdog group sued the NIH for
noncompliance were they able to pry the documentation from them, and
even then, it was redacted.
The fact that government agencies are increasingly refusing to comply
with FOIA laws is a serious problem, Jason Foster, president of Empower
Oversight says, as “the public’s business ought to be public.” In an
April 2022 Newsweek opinion piece, he wrote:13
“Last November my organization, Empower Oversight,
sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for failing to comply with
Freedom of Information Act requests related to the agency's response to
the COVID-19 pandemic.
Around half a dozen other entities have also been
forced to go to court to compel the NIH to make pandemic documents
public. It's worth noting that this didn't need to happen. Good lawyers
charge hundreds of dollars an hour or more and hiring legal talent to
pursue cases full time is not easy.
By forcing public interest groups to spend this money
on litigation before complying with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
requests, the NIH is locking out the vast majority of Americans from
accessing federal records. It takes financial resources to most
effectively probe how our government operates ...
We all pay extra when anyone sues the government. The
process sucks up court time and expenses, and forces lawyers at the
Department of Justice to get involved and collect agency documents. It
would all be cheaper and faster if the NIH simply followed the law in
the first place.”
Why Public Confidence Is Tanking
When federal agencies shirk disclosure laws, they also erode public
confidence. Over the past 18 months, we’ve repeatedly discovered that
federal officials have lied to our faces, thanks to organizations
footing the bill to sue them for information they’re required to release
voluntarily.
For example, as detailed by Foster,14
The Intercept sued, forcing the NIH to fess up correspondence that
ended up confirming the NIH was in fact funding gain of function
research at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Emails also showed the NIH allowed the EcoHealth Alliance to craft
the language that governed this controversial and risky research, even
though the NIH is supposed to regulate EcoHealth Alliance’s work!
None of this would have come to light had The Intercept not sued to
force the NIH to comply with FOIA rules. Other public interest groups,
such as Knowledge Ecology International and Public Citizen, have sued
the agency to determine its role in the development of COVID-19
therapies.
“These requests are important because taxpayers helped subsidize vaccines for which we are now paying top dollar,” Foster notes.15
Forced FOIA disclosures have also shown the NIH is redacting
information under false pretenses. In documents released to Buzzfeed,
after they sued, the NIH redacted part of an email citing exemption code
7(A), which permits the withholding of “records compiled for law
enforcement purposes when disclosure could reasonably be expected to
interfere with enforcement proceedings.”16
Later, when senators requested the records, that passage was left
unredacted. As it turns out, the redacted passage couldn’t possibly have
been withheld for law enforcement purposes, because the blotted-out
sentence was simply EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak telling
Fauci about “work we’ve been doing in collaboration with Chinese
virologists.”
In other words, the NIH simply wanted their “collaboration with
Chinese virologists” to remain secret. This is profoundly dishonest, and
piles insult on top of injury. Clearly, the NIH — as well as other
federal agencies — have become cesspools of corruption and malfeasance.
Foster even points out that then-director of the NIH, Collins, was
personally reviewing and clearing FOIA requests — “an odd use of time by
the director of a public health agency in the midst of a pandemic.”17 Indeed. Rep. Dr. Neal Dunn, R-Fla., told The Epoch Times:18
“It’s no secret that the agency needs reform. Their
many issues were exacerbated and highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Providing the public with transparent access to how the NIH is spending
taxpayer dollars and reaching their decisions is a basic responsibility,
and they must be held accountable. Now more than ever, we must commit
to reforming our federal health agencies and restoring America’s trust
in public health.”
The question is, can they be reformed, or is the rot too deep to
clean out? Perhaps we need to strip these agencies down to nothing and
rebuild from scratch?
EcoHealth Covered Up Deadly Experiments
While the news of undisclosed royalty payments to NIH scientists is
gaining traction, members of the U.S. Congress are also calling for an
investigation into the EcoHealth Alliance, to determine the true scope
of its cover-up.
As reported by the New York Post:19
“Documents the White Coat Waste Project obtained via
the Freedom of Information Act revealed ... that in 2016, staffers at
the ... NIAID ... worried that EcoHealth’s animal experiments ran afoul
of the government’s moratorium on gain-of-function research — the
practice of manipulating viruses to make them more transmissible, more
lethal and more dangerous.
Instead of stopping the project, however, NIAID
offered EcoHealth the chance to create its own policy governing the
dangerous research, then allowed the planned animal experiments to
proceed ... EcoHealth promised NIAID it would stop its experiments, and
immediately report, if the coronaviruses it engineered showed viral
growth greater than 10 times that of the original virus.
The novel coronaviruses did get more dangerous, with
viral growth 10,000 times greater than that of the original virus, and
made mice very sick. We now know that EcoHealth did not properly report
the increased virulence — in violation of its self-imposed grant terms.
Now, House investigators, led by Rep. Cathy McMorris
Rodgers (R-Wash.), have revealed that EcoHealth seems to have hidden far
more data than previously known. Her letter to NIH notes that EcoHealth
reported that its infected mice had only ‘mild’ clinical symptoms when,
in reality, the infection had a 75% death rate.
EcoHealth apparently obscured the fact that its
experiments caused an alarming increase in mouse deaths by deleting the
word ‘dead’ from the phrase ‘dead point’ on a graph, though it appeared
in earlier reports. Its omission made it look as though mice were simply
carrying more of the virus, rather than dying in droves ...
Investigators suggest that EcoHealth’s omission was
not accidental and was ‘intended to deceive ... peer reviewers.’ Had
they known what was actually going on, reviewers likely ‘would have
wanted to stop such risky research and not continue EcoHealth’s
funding.’”
CDC in a Panic Over Own Disinformation Being Disclosed
Internal documents and emails from the U.S. Centers for Disease
control (obtained through FOIA requests) reveal it too is guilty of
obfuscation and cover-ups. In a report issued by the CDC’s Advisory
Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) December 18, 2020, the
Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was said to have “consistent high
efficacy” of 92% or more among people with evidence of previous
SARS-CoV-2 infection.20
Based on this, the CDC urged everyone, including those who had previously recovered from COVID, to get the shot.
After carefully reviewing the Pfizer trial data, Rep. Thomas Massie —
a Republican Congressman for Kentucky and an award-winning scientist —
discovered the ACIP’s claim was completely false. Pfizer’s trial showed
NO efficacy among participants with previous COVID infection, and there
was no proof of efficacy in the Moderna trial either, for that matter.
In a January 30, 2021, Full Measure report,21,22
investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson described how Massie tried to
get the CDC to correct its error. After multiple phone calls, CDC
deputy director Dr. Anne Schuchat finally acknowledged the error and
told Massie it would be fixed. However, when the CDC issued its
“correction,” at the end of January 2021, they did not fix the error.
Instead, they simply rephrased the lie in a different way.
The “correction” still misleadingly suggested that vaccination was
effective for those previously infected, even though the data showed no
such thing. Now, emails reveal Massie’s discussions with the CDC ignited
a firestorm of panic.23 More than 1,000 pages of emails mention Massie’s concern that they were putting out disinformation and misleading the public.
Exactly what they said is hard to determine, however, as many of the
emails are 100% redacted. Some did try to defend the false information,
though, highlighting certain paragraphs that might justify vaccinating
people with natural immunity.
“It’s unclear why conversations between CDC officials
and scientists on matters of great public health importance would be
kept hidden from public view,” Attkisson writes,24 adding, “Nobody
was held publicly accountable for the serious and potentially dangerous
false information the CDC officials and scientists signed off on and
publicized.”
In her May 9, 2022, update on the CDC’s disinformation campaign,
Attkisson also points out that the CDC has been tracking and logging
CDC-related tweets by members of Congress. The purpose of that Twitter
post collection is unclear. Probably, someone should demand an answer.
On the whole, it seems all of our federal health agencies are
corrupted and broken, possibly beyond repair. Not one of them has
fulfilled their mandate to protect public health. Instead, they’ve lied
to us and protected Big Pharma profits, part of which gets kicked back
to them. At this point, anyone who listens to and trusts the NIH, the
CDC or the Food and Drug Administration, does so at their own
risk.