appointing great thieves

the advanced rot of late stage bureaucratic empire

the american voter is a weird and fickle beast.

show them bankster bailouts and they rage.

but show them a grifter garden of NIH royalties, and it’s hard to even elicit notice.

i will just never understand hoomans…

THIS STORY has been making the rounds.

i actually think the sourcing is a bit lacking and the manner in which is is presented a somewhat misleading and so the numbers are suspect and do not really jibe, but it does raise an important issue:

the NIH is a thieves forest where the public money they take from your taxes is used to fund research, but when the research proves fruitful the royalty payments therefrom often go not to the agency but to the individual staffers who were involved.

not only are they making out like bandits, but they have no obligation to report these royalties or their amounts publicly or even to congress.

there is zero oversight and this makes the insider trading rules in the house and senate look positively benign.

it’s a helluva grift.

OpenTheBooks, a transparency organization, recently released over 1,500 unredacted records revealing the leaders of the country’s National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases profited off the virus that killed thousands of people. 

and you can see some of what they found in the link above.

but it’s limited on dates and has no amounts.

the key stream we'd want to see is moderna (who licensed the tech for their covid vaccine from NIH) and they sure do pay a lot of royalties to a lot of folks, but again, no numbers and nothing for the period in mid 2021 and forward that would likely be most interesting (because that’s when the covid payments would have been).

this is hard to get to reproduce, but this will give you a sense on the count of moderna royalty payments

it’s A LOT.

but it also does not even include the big ones.

here’s where the gravy got thick:

$400 million is A LOT of cheddar, the kind of money that sets people up for life when they retire from NIH. the kind of money that bends morality like a black hole bends light.

how much of it went to individuals?

that’s quite a thing to refuse to disclose.

you’d think this kind of personal profit incentive would get flagged as the most egregious of conflicts of interest and be both banned and scrutinized with the utmost care for the merest whiff of impropriety or influence peddling.

but, well

instead, not only does no one prevent this, it’s actively encouraged and any and all monitoring is proscribed.

even the congress critters are fought tooth and claw in the unlikely event they even deign to ask about this. (though rand paul is, as ever, game for a fight)

and testimony got testy.

“The NIH continues to refuse to voluntarily divulge the names of scientists who receive royalties and from which companies over the period of time from 2010 to 2016, 27,000 royalty payments were paid to 1800 NIH employees,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said. “We know that. Not because you told us, but because we forced you to tell us through the Freedom of Information Act.

"Over $193 million was given to these... 1800 employees," Paul added. "Can you tell me that you have not received a royalty from any entity that you ever oversaw the distribution of money in research grants?"

and here’s where is starts to get fun:

"Here's what I want to know. It's not just about you, everybody on the vaccine committee, have any of them ever received money from the people who make vaccines?" Paul asked. "Can you tell me that? Can you tell me if anybody on the vaccine approval committees ever receive any money from people?"

you might wanna sit down:

"First of all, according to the regulations, people who receive royalties are not required to divulge them, even on their financial statement, according to the Bayh-Dole act," Fauci said.

i mean, damn.

so let’s get serious here for a second.

this is clearly an absurd and untenable situation.

there is no sane version of the world where the people who use your money to give grants should get paid if the grants generate products. it’s basically a VC fund where the partners use your money to invest and keep the winnings. all of them.

the incentive set is past perverse and well into “plunder.”

and could you possibly trust the folks faced with such incentives to tell you true about the safety and efficacy of the products they pimp for?

or might they be inclined to get indignant and tell some serious porkie pies in service of themselves?

because that sure could get ugly.

truly, all late stage empires seem to end up in the same place.

times change, but human nature does not.

#DemandBetter

(not a fable)