Tag Archives: National Institutes of Health

Follow The Money

Posted on by

On Sunday, The New York Post posted an article about the relationship between the National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical industry during the Covid pandemic.

The article reports:

During the pandemic, the American people started to feel that Big Government was very cozy with Big Pharma.

Now we know just how close they were.

New data from the National Institutes of Health reveal the agency and its scientists collected $710 million in royalties during the pandemic, from late 2021 through 2023. These are payments made by private companies, like pharmaceuticals, to license medical innovations from government scientists.

Almost all that cash — $690 million — went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and 260 of its scientists.

Information about this vast private royalty complex is tightly held by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). My organization, OpenTheBooks.com, was forced to sue to uncover the royalties paid from September 2009 to October 2021, which amounted to $325 million over 56,000 transactions.

We had to sue a second time, with Judicial Watch as our counsel, to pry open this new release.

Payments skyrocketed during the pandemic era: Those years saw more than double the amount of cash flow to NIH from the private sector, compared to the prior 12 combined. All told, it’s $1.036 billion.

It’s unclear if any of the COVID vaccine royalties from Pfizer and Moderna, the latter of which settled with NIH by agreeing to pay $400 million, is even included in these new numbers. NIH isn’t saying.

Anthony Fauci is currently testifying before a House subcommittee hearing about the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the origins of the virus. There are a lot of things that the American people are entitled to know about the virus, its origins, the effectiveness of the vaccine, and the dangers of the vaccine. Hopefully these hearings will provide some of that information. However, if the public was intentionally misled, there need to be consequences. We have had an awful lot of hearings on various subjects and very little consequences.

Investigating Government Policies On Covid-19

Posted on by

I seriously doubt that there was a perfect solution for handling Covid-19 when it appeared in 2020. However, I also wonder if the government actually got anything rights. An investigation into the government’s handling of the pandemic would be very useful in developing a template for handling future pandemics.

On January 19th, The Daily Signal posted a checklist for the House of Representatives committee that is investigating the government’s handling of the pandemic.

The article notes:

After three years, and more than 1 million deaths in the U.S. associated with COVID-19, a comprehensive, sober, and detailed investigation into the federal government’s response is a necessary precondition for restoring Americans’ trust in federal public health agencies.

Specifically, that includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Office of the Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services.  

A Heritage Foundation analysis of the federal public health performance identified 13 pandemic-related topics that deserve detailed congressional inquiry. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Here are some of the things that need to be investigated:

  • Why did the CDC, despite statutory requirements dating back to 2006, fail to modernize and upgrade its systems of data collection and dissemination? Dr. Deborah Birx, former coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force under Trump, has already told Congress that “the No.1 public health issue in the United States today is that there is no comprehensive database or integration of data from laboratories, public health institutions, and clinics.”  
  • Why did federal public health authorities send out confusing messaging on the value of masks and mask mandates? Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the CDC and then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams initially insisted, very publicly and sometimes vehemently, that masking was unnecessary or ineffective. Previous studies on masking indeed failed to provide strong support for cloth masking, let alone mask mandates. Between February and April 2020, however, top federal officials did a U-turn, and insisted on the value of a masking policy that they previously opposed. What was the new scientific evidence, then available in the professional literature, for such a dramatic policy reversal in that brief period? Congress should find out.
  • Why did federal officials attempt to impose a set of unprecedented vaccine mandates on tens of millions of Americans without weighing the risks and benefits of vaccination for different cohorts of the population, based on age, the acquisition of natural immunity, or an underlying vulnerability to the virus?  Young and healthy persons faced little danger of severe illness or death from COVID-19. Robust findings in the professional literature demonstrated the strength of natural immunity. Recent research on vaccine boosters for young adults concludes that potential harms outweigh the benefits of the vaccination.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. America is supposed to be a representative republic–our elected officials are supposed to represent us and answer to us–it’s time they did.

This Explains A Lot

Posted on by

Yesterday Just the News posted an article about the members of the National Institutes of Health’s COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel. It seems as if they have allowed their financial interests to interfere with the interests of the Americans who have contracted the coronavirus.

The article reports:

Members of the National Institutes of Health’s COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel have financial ties to a company behind clinical trials of a drug to treat coronavirus, as well as to another large pharmaceutical company involved with developing a COVID-19 vaccine.

According to the NIH, members of the panel include U.S. physicians, statisticians, and other experts who are developing treatment guidelines on COVID-19 “intended for healthcare providers.”

A total of eight panel members list a financial relationship with Gilead Sciences on the panel’s Financial Disclosure for Companies Related to COVID-19 Treatment or Diagnostics document: Judith Aberg, MD, Adaora Adimora, MD, Jason Baker, MD, Roger Bedimo, MD, Eric Daar, MD, David V. Glidden, PhD, Susanna Naggie, MD, and Pablo Tebas, MD.  

The U.S. has reportedly bought almost all of Gilead Sciences’ supply of the COVID-19 drug remdesivir. The company announced on June 1 the results of a phase 3 clinical trial of the drug in patients with moderate COVID-19.

On Monday, Gilead applied for FDA approval of remdesivir, which has been available for emergency use with patients hospitalized with severe cases of COVID-19.

The article notes:

Dr. William O’Neill, a cardiologist and Medical Director at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, Mich., told Just the News contributor Sharyl Attkisson in an interview for her news program “Full Measure” that he is less impressed with remdesivir.

“There is a lot of hype for the drug,” said O’Neil, adding that he sees “no big benefit” to remdesivir after reading medical journal reports on it.  

This appears to be a blatant example of ‘follow the money’ resulting in Americans dying from the coronavirus because of pressure to block using hydroxychloroquine. It should be noted that remdesivir costs thousands of dollars for one pill and hydroxychloroquine costs less than a dollar for one pill. It’s sad to think that doctors would behave so badly, but it appears that they have.

What Happened To Ethics In Science?

Posted on by

Yesterday CNS News posted an article about research going on at the University of California at San Francisco. This research is so horrific I can’t even believe it is being done in America, much less being partially financed by the government.

The article reports:

The Department of Health and Human Services says it has granted a second 90-day extension to a contract it has with the University of California at San Francisco that requires UCSF to make “humanized mice.”

These creatures are made by implanting mice with human tissues taken from late-term aborted babies.

The HHS’s multi-million-dollar contract with UCSF that requires the construction of these “humanized mice” creates a demand–driven by federal tax dollars–for tissue taken from late-term aborted babies. According to an estimate it has published on its website, the National Institutes of Health (which is a division of HHS) will spend $95 million this fiscal year alone on research that–like UCSF’s “humanized mouse” contract–uses human fetal tissue.

Under the new 90-day extension, the contract—which the government calls “Humanized Mouse Models for HIV Therapeutics Development”–will run through June 5.

HHS also is still in the process of conducting the “comprehensive review” it announced last September “of all research involving fetal tissue.”

It’s bad enough that we are killing the unborn. Now we are using them for scientific experiments. That is beyond repulsive.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Posted on by

WJLA posted an article on Monday about a recent study funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The article reports:

You can learn a lot from studying birds and every year government funded research does just that.

But it’s one study in particular Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has been railing against for years.

“$356,000 was spent of your money studying whether or not Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) in a speech on the Senate Floor.

According to scientists, the effects of drugs like cocaine have similar brain effects in quails as in humans. The study looked at behavior patterns while on the drug and found “repeated exposure to cocaine during sexual activity may increase sexual motivation which may, in turn, may lead to high risk sexual activities.”

It cost us $356,000 to find out that cocaine use during sex might be a problem. Most of our mothers could have told us that cocaine use at any time is a problem. Rather than look at the impact of cocaine on sexual activity, why not divert that money to helping combat the opioid crisis in America? The quail on cocaine study is truly a waste of taxpayer money.

The People Who Make Our Laws Can’t Even Follow Their Own Rules

Posted on by

CBN News is reporting today that despite passing a law last year that made earmarks illegal, Congress passed more than 100 earmarks for 2014.

The article reports:

Every year, the Pig Book Summary blasts Congress for its wasteful pork barrel projects.

“There are 109 earmarks, costing taxpayers $2.7 billion in fiscal year 2014,” Thomas Schatz, with Citizens against Government Waste, told CBN News.

Congress has even passed millions in spending for agencies who didn’t want the money.

One example of an agency that did not want the money is the $90 million for M1 tanks the Pentagon insists it really doesn’t want.

The article further reports:

“The secretary of the Army said they don’t need to build more M1s. They want to delay this for four years and save $3 billion,” Schatz said. “There are 2,000 M1s sitting idle in the desert of California.”

Meanwhile, the Defense Department is getting $866 million to mostly duplicate research on the very same illnesses and diseases as the civilian sector.

“Breast cancer research can be done at the National Institutes of Health and it’s done –billions of dollars [for] other research done at other agencies,” Schatz charged.

Americans are pinching pennies to stay afloat in the so-called economic recovery, and Congress is borrowing money our children and grandchildren will have to pay back. This is ridiculous. It’s time to vote every Congressman out of office who has supported the runaway spending of recent years.

Enhanced by Zemanta