Gov’t Scientists Received Royalties From Big Pharma, China & Russia

It seems that ‘covid experts’ Dr Anthony Fauci and one of his cohorts, former NIH Director Dr. Franci Collins, were cashing in on the covid crisis.

Recently released documents have revealed that the National Institute of Health (NIH) received approximately $325 million in royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies and research organizations over a span of 12 years.

The new documents were obtained by nonprofit government transparency organization Open The Books.

NTD reports: Open The Books received records detailing more than 56,000 royalty payments to NIH members Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) between 2009 and 2021.

The government watchdog organization has been seeking these NIH royalty payment records for nearly two years, as part of a series of FOIA requests. The NIH has fought the document disclosure requests and these documents came through new productions in a Washington D.C. federal court case (pdf).

Last year, Open The Books estimated the NIH received as much as $350 million in royalty payments between 2009 and 2020. The organization revised that figure downward as the NIH provided new details about its royalty payments…

…Among the recipients of royalty payments between 2009 and 2020 were then-NIH Director Francis Collins and then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci. NIAID is an NIH component.

The records include 37 royalty payments entries to Dr. Fauci from Ancell Corporation, Chiron Corporation, and Santa Cruz Biotechnology Inc.

There were 21 entries for Mr. Collins, from GeneDx, Inc., IONIS, ISIS Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the Progeria Research Foundation, and Specialty Laboratories, Inc.

According to the NYP : Fauci has said he donates all royalties to charity.

The NIH permits inventors to take up to $2,000 in their first collection from a licensee; up to 15% for royalties between $2,000 and $50,000; and up to 25% for royalties above $50,000.

They may not receive more than $150,000 annually from royalties.

Unredacted documents obtained by the group through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show at least 34 Chinese companies are licensing NIH technologies initially funded by US taxpayers.

Some of those licensing fees came from the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of the Chinese government-owned pharmaceutical company Sinopharm, which produced a COVID-19 vaccine.

In 2016, the biological products company moved its headquarters next to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where risky “gain-of-function” research funded by the US government may have led to the outbreak of the pandemic.

The late Dr. Robert Chanock, the former head of the NIAID’s laboratory of infectious diseases, and Dr. Jeffrey Cohen, his successor, were just a few of the virologists on the take from the Wuhan-based company.

Pokrov Biologics Plant — a Russian animal vaccine producer reported to be a front for Soviet-era bioweapons research — also made several payments to two scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Other third-party payments came from firms in at least 31 countries, including Belarus, Switzerland, Japan, Germany, France, Canada, India, Ireland, Singapore, Israel, and the United Kingdom.

Royalties also came from US-based Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which has twice pleaded guilty to deceptive marketing tactics in selling the opioid OxyContin.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who recently referred Fauci to the Department of Justice for having allegedly lied to Congress about government funding of Chinese labs, recently asked the Senate to mandate royalty disclosures from federal employees — but was shot down in committee by Democrats and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

“Some employees of the federal government are receiving royalties paid out by companies, including pharmaceutical manufacturers, who often have business before the agencies that oversee them,” he said in a July Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing. “Without this amendment, taxpayers, and Congress itself are left in the dark when trying to assess conflicts of interest.”

The year before, Fauci had declined to say in a Senate hearing what companies paid him third-party royalties.