The Covid-19 epidemic changed America in many ways–it showed parents what their children were learning in school, and it illustrated the danger of government overreach. The epidemic showed us that the freedoms that we take for granted as Americans were not as solid as we thought they were. In many places, our right to worship in our churches was taken away. One of the forces behind the government overreach was The National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Fauci served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022, and the chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022. He was a physician with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), A lot of the policies during the Covid epidemic was directed by Dr. Fauci.
On Saturday, The Epoch Times reported the following:
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be divided into three separate operational divisions with presidentially appointed leaders serving time-limited terms under legislation (pdf) introduced in Congress by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).
The proposed NIH Reform Act would divide NIH’s current National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Dr. Anthony Fauci managed for more than 38 years—longer than J. Edgar Hoover oversaw the FBI—by creating three new, separate institutes, one for allergic diseases, a second for infectious diseases, and a third for immunological diseases.
The reform proposal provides presidentially appointed directors for each of the three new NIH institutes, with Senate confirmation required for no more than two consecutive five-year terms. By contrast, Fauci was appointed to head NIAID by then-NIH Director James Wynngaarden in 1984.
Sounds like a very good idea.
This is the most disturbing part of the article:
Fauci has also been a lightning rod for criticism as a result of NIH’s controversial policy allowing employees to receive royalties from pharmaceutical manufacturers for their assistance in developing new drugs. The amounts of the royalties, as well as who paid and who received them, have until recently been kept secret by NIH.
Acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak conceded during a recent congressional hearing that such secret royalty payments create the appearance of a conflict of interest, although he insisted that the agency has sufficient internal safeguards to prevent such an occurrence.
The secret royalties were exposed by Open The Books (OTB), a nonprofit government watchdog that filed a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Those requests were ignored by NIH until OTB took the agency to federal court.
When a federal judge ordered NIH to release the information to OTB, it was learned that payments totaling in excess of $134 million were paid to more than 1,600 NIH executives, scientists, and researchers by outside firms, thought to be primarily from the pharmaceutical industry, between 2010 and 2014. The matter was first reported by The Epoch Times in May.
Royalty payments went to at least three of the top echelon of NIH leaders, including Dr. Francis Collins, the immediate past director of NIH, who got 14 payments. Fauci received 23 payments and his deputy, Clifford Lane, received eight.
It’s time for reform.