(Headline USA) Coronavirus Czar Dr. Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins raked in more than $350 million in secret “royalty” payments from drug companies over a 10-year period, according to a new watchdog report.
The report from Open The Books revealed that Fauci and Collins received 23 and 14 secret payments, respectively, between 2010 and 2020 for being “co-inventors” of various treatments and pharmaceutical products. Their relationship with these drug companies in developing these products is problematic since the NIH works with the Food and Drug Administration to grant them approval, the watchdog explained.
“Because those payments enrich the agency and its scientists, each and every royalty payment could be a potential conflict of interest and needs disclosure,” the group’s CEO Adam Andrzejewski said in a statement.
“NIH is a revolving door of tens of billions of dollars in government grant-making coupled with hundreds of millions of dollars in private – non-transparent – royalty payments.”
Moreover, the NIH’s filings on the royalty payments were heavily redacted, which means it is impossible to know just how much money Fauci and Collins received. Every attempt to gather more information about the payments has been blocked, Andrzejewski said.
As a result, Open The Books took the NIH to court, where the agency finally agreed to release 300 pages a month. However, the agency said it will not hand over documents related to Fauci until the very end.
Andrzejewski said he expects the Fauci documents to reveal a lot about the White House medical adviser’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When a federal bureaucrat pops up on television giving us health instructions, who has paid them and for what research and technology?” he said. “When a patient agrees to a clinical trial or experimental treatment, what financial interests are involved?”
