Waste of the Day: NIH Still Hiding Details of $710 Million In Pandemic Royalties

Topline: Pharmaceutical and healthcare companies paid a total of $710 million in third-party royalties to the National Institutes of Health in 2022 and 2023, according to records obtained through federal litigation by OpenTheBooks.

Royalties are always a problem

Out of the $710 million, there was $690 million paid to one part of the NIH, The National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), formerly run by Dr. Anthony Fauci. There were 260 of its scientists who received a payment; however, the dollar figure paid to individual scientists is still hidden and redacted in the disclosures.

Third-party royalties are payments made by private companies who use technologies previously invented by scientists working for the government. NIH leadership has admitted that each payment has the appearance of a conflict of interest, yet they asked the American people to trust them, because “we have firewalls.”

Taxpayers are very generous with NIH. Last year, Congress appropriated a $50 billion budget for NIH. Yet, the agency resists basic transparency of its key operations and programs.

Key facts: Moderna made 29 of the payments, and Pfizer made nine. However, the federal government paid $10 billion and $60 million to the vaccine makers, respectively, who, in turn, made payments in the form of third-party royalties that enriched the NIAID and its scientists. Moderna alone paid $400 million in third-party royalties to NIAID (we know this from court records, not from NIH disclosures).

There were 139 royalty payments from Changchun BCHT and China National Biotech Group, two vaccine developers owned by the Chinese government.

Another 66 payments came from Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corp, the Taiwanese company that created the MVC Covid-19 vaccine.

Who got the checks?

Dean Metcalfe, chief of the NIAID’s Mast Cell Biology Section, received 79 royalty payments. Four other scientists each cashed more than 40 checks. However, the NIH still refuses to reveal the names of scientists receiving 5,000 payments since 2009, claiming the names are “trade secrets.”

The third-party royalty cash haul during the pandemic represents a sharp increase from the $325 million royalty payments the NIH received from 2009-2021.

OpenTheBooks twice sued NIH in federal court with the assistance of the nonprofit, public interest law firm, Judicial Watch because the agency refused to comply with the Freedom of Information Act requests.

After years of federal litigation, NIH still won’t reveal the value of each individual payment, just the overall dollar total to NIH and its individual institutes, like NIAID.

Background: Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) asked Dr. Fauci about OpenTheBooks’ findings in a House hearing on June 3, but Fauci dodged the question by denying that he personally accepted any Covid-19 related royalty payments. “Somebody did, but not me,” Fauci said.

Fauci and his wife, Dr. Christine Grady, the chief bioethicist at Fauci’s previous employer, NIH, collectively earned nearly $1 million in cash compensation and estimated benefits paid for by taxpayers in 2022, OpenTheBooks previously reported.

Search all federal, state and local government salaries and vendor spending with the AI search bot, Benjamin, at OpenTheBooks.com.

Too many secrets

Summary: OpenTheBooks will continue to fight in federal court until we open the books on the third-party royalty program at NIH.

The entire complex of third-party royalties continues to be cloaked in too much secrecy.

For example, since October 2009, on nearly 5,000 transactions, the name of the scientist continues to be redacted; all 70,000 royalty transactions have the amount of the individual payment redacted; and NIH hasn’t updated their license database since 2020 – so we can’t match inventions to the scientist or entity licensing the invention, i.e. all the Covid-era licensing.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.