More than $350 million in secretive “royalty” payments from drug companies and other third parties over a 10-year period were reaped by Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins and other bigwigs at the National Institutes of Health, according to a new report from a watchdog organization.
The royalty payments, including at least 23 to Fauci and 14 to his former boss, Collins, were paid out between 2010 and 2020, the report from OpenTheBooks.com said. According to the report, government scientists got the payments for being credited as “co-inventors” of various treatments and pharmaceutical products.
“Because those payments enrich the agency and its scientists, each and every royalty payment could be a potential conflict of interest and needs disclosure. 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,” OpenTheBooks.com co-founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski wrote, said report.
While it is not yet known how much the payments to Fauci, who is the U.S. government’s highest-salaried employee at $456,028, totaled, the report shows that the NIH doled out $30 billion a year in grants to some 56,000 recipients in Big Pharma, research institutes and other entities, with money flowing back to the secretive agency’s scientists and senior management in the form of huge royalty payments.
“Since the NIH documents are heavily redacted, we can only see how many payments each scientist received, and, separately, the aggregate dollars per NIH agency. This is a gatekeeping at odds with the spirit and perhaps the letter of open-records laws,” wrote Andrzejewski.
Last year, in addition to his salary and to who knows how much royalty payments he has received, Fauci won a $1 million prize from the Dan David Foundation for “speaking truth to power.”