Anthony Fauci heads to Capitol Hill Monday to testify before the House Select Subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic.
Secret royalty payments from drug companies to scientists, researchers, executives, and other employees of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) jumped following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, according to a new report from a nonprofit government watchdog.
“In 2022 and 2023, pharmaceutical and healthcare companies paid the [NIH] a sum of $710,381,160 in third-party royalties. These were payments healthcare companies made to NIH, its leadership, and scientists to license medical inventions created in federal, taxpayer-funded labs,” OpenTheBooks.com reports in an analysis being made public June 3 as former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci testifies before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The Epoch Times obtained a copy of the full report.
“The National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led until recently by Dr. Anthony Fauci, collected nearly all of it: $690,218,610 of the $710 million,” the report said.
The $710 million total for 2022-2023 is double the $325 million OpentheBooks.com previously reported was paid to NIH employees between 2009 and 2021. The nonprofit watchdog has had to take NIH to federal court twice for failing to provide requested data not covered by any of the nine exemptions to the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Among the recipients of royalties was NIAID’s John Mascola, who was selected to manage Operation Warp Speed, the government’s crash program to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus.
More than 1.2 million Americans have been reported as dying as a result of contracting the virus since January 2020.
Dr. Mascola, who managed NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center since 2013, had received royalty payments from Moderna since 2018, when he selected the company as one of the government’s partners in Operation Warp Speed.
Moderna received more than $10 billion from the government between 2020 and 2022 for its work developing a vaccine and delivering millions of doses to health care agencies. In 2013 to 2017, the government paid Moderna $60 million for development work on the mRNA technology that’s the basis of the coronavirus vaccine.
