When Anthony Fauci spoke almost daily during the pandemic’s height, was he following science or orders from big pharma?
Doctor Fauci has directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. The doctor is also the chief medical advisor to the president of the United States. Many U.S. citizens questioned his changing policies that seemed to have a political bias, but an equal number trusted him implicitly.
When he promoted courses of medical action such as vaccination, masks and boosters or disparaged treating COVID-19 with Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, millions of Americans followed his instructions. Many citizens trusted him based on his long tenure with the CDC and his decades of leadership. No one outside government and pharmaceutical companies were aware that Fauci and other CDC officials were receiving royalty checks every year.
OpenTheBooks is a Chicago-based government watchdog group that filed almost 47,000 Freedom of Information requests with the federal government last year, according to its website.
The organization forced the National Institutes of Health to disclose more than 22,100 royalty payments received by the agency and almost 1,700 agency scientists. The NIH revealed receipt of nearly $134 million between September 2009 and September 2014 in response to a court order in a case OpenTheBooks recently won against the NIH.
“The agency admits to holding 3,000 pages of line-by-line royalties since 2009,” CEO Adam Andrzejewski said in a statement. “So far, they’ve produced only 1,200 pages. The next 1,800 pages of production will cover the period 2015-2020.”
“The NIH is a dark money pit,” said Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). “They covered up grants for gain of function research in Wuhan, so it is no surprise that they are now refusing to release critical data regarding allegations of millions in royalty fees paid to in-house scientists like Fauci.”
“If the NIH wants to keep spending taxpayer dollars, they have a responsibility to provide transparency.”
Other Republicans expressed similar outrage at the royalties revelation, including Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas. He and Sen. Blackburn were among a number of lawmakers noted in a report by The Epoch Times.
“This report is disturbing and if it is true that some of our country’s top scientists have conflict of interest problems, the American people deserve to have all the answers,” Cruz declared.
Even though a federal court reportedly ordered the multibillion dollar health agency to disclose the payments to OpenTheBooks, the partial responses received have been heavily redacted. The watchdog group reported that the amount of royalty payments to a particular agency employee was not disclosed. The NIH only revealed the number of royalty payments provided to each scientist at the agency.
According to records received by the group, Fauci’s annual salary of $456,000 was supplemented by 23 royalty payments of undisclosed amounts during the five years. His deputy at the NIAID, Clifford Lane, supplemented his $325,000 civil servant’s salary with an undisclosed amount from eight royalty payments during that five-year period.
Francis Collins, who led the NIH from 2009 to 2021, received 14 royalty payments to boost his $203,000 government salary.
It is unclear why the federal agency appears so determined to obscure the amount of royalty payments it passes on to its employees. Cynics might argue that bureaucrats hide things that would lead to embarrassment or arrest if made public, but it could also be that improperly trained employees are providing the court-ordered disclosures.
Equally unclear is whose interests are government health officials representing when advising U.S. citizens about medical solutions to pressing health concerns.
CDC public affairs representatives could not be reached by telephone and did not immediately respond to a Resist the Mainstream email request for comment.
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