Patents, Profits and Lining One’s Pockets

It would seem obvious to the dimmest of average citizens that government employees should not collect hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for supporting and endorsing the products of pharmaceutical corporations. Even a child could understand that this would lead to dishonesty, favoritism and criminality at the expense of public health. But that’s the situation inside the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases—Fauci’s agency. And not just NIAID but also the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

Most of us never knew anything about this bizarre situation until the backstory behind COVID began to be exposed. When I learned of it, I was staggered by how obviously wrong this situation is. So we have the ridiculous situation itself and we also have another situation of all the people who should have known it was wrong and did know it was wrong but they did nothing. Or they profited themselves in some way. For years. 

From the book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The CDC, for example, owns 57 vaccine patents and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines. NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments [compensation, fees, salary] of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process. 

That’s not the only way federal employees can line their pockets. This, from page 119:

Researchers in NIAID’s labs supplement their income with honoraria [payment for a service such as a speech] by attending Pharma seminars and briefing pharmaceutical company personnel with inside information about research progress on new drugs in NIAID’s pipeline. Dr. Fauci’s underlings routinely perform private drug projects for drug companies in their NIAID labs and take contract work running clinical trials for Pharma’s new drugs. Journalist and author Bruce Nussbaum reports that it is standard practice for Dr. Fauci’s employees to pocket enough gravy from the deal flow to add 10-20 percent to their NIAID salaries from this sort of work. 

What’s more, NIAID siphons off 40 to 60 percent of the pharmaceutical corporations’ fees as “overhead,” motivating NIAID to ignore any impropriety.

This inappropriate relationship between NIAID and Pharma has been no secret. In 2004, Fauci was reprimanded by the Office of Government Ethics for failing to control these incestuous relationships. But just like with the pharmaceutical companies that apologize for wrongdoing and promise to change, nothing happened. 

Then, in 2020 the General Accounting Office published a report titled BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH: NIH Should Publicly Report More Information about the Licensing of Its Intellectual Property. The GAO reported that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has received “up to $2 billion in royalty revenue for NIH since 1999 when FDA approved the first of these drugs. Three licenses generated more than $100 million each for the agency.”

But apparently, even the GAO didn’t get the full story from the NIH. Kennedy notes that missing from the GAO report are more than 130 patents belonging to the NIH associated with drugs that generate billions in dollars for the agency. [Page 120] 

Well, this kind of data just goes on and on and on. Read Chapter 2, “Pharma Profits Over Public Health.”

I was going to talk about what seems inappropriate to me but I don’t even know where to start. I have honestly thought that while there was waste and idiocy, there was some good coming out of SOME of these agencies. I now am firmly convinced that we could eliminate entire swaths of agencies starting with the NIH, FDA and most of HHS and CDC and never miss them. I do get some good statistics on drug abuse from the CDC so their statistical arm can stay. 

PS: I have inserted a couple of definitions in the text above.