pay for play is illegal in most private spheres. do this as a university admission officer, it’s a scandal. pay your boss 20% of the raise he gives you and your company will fire you both.

but in government, kickbacks are the norm.

all the laws are different.

congress critters get rich insider trading the companies they pass laws to regulate and subsidize.
teachers unions make hefty donations to the mayors and governors that will determine their budgets and negotiate their contracts.
and a mississippi river of dirty money runs through the NIH.

not to the agency.

to the actual people who work there.

the same ones who make grant allocations and product and policy recommendations.

and they are not even required to disclose it. until recently, few even knew this. not even congress. it took a congressional FOIA request to unearth this fact and it STILL has not named names. all they got was a redacted mess.

these are the people very likely getting moderna royalties (NIH sure is) while playing a huge public role in setting vaccine policy.

and this is NOT a small thing.

in any other field, this kind of undisclosed conflict of interest would be jailtime.

but here, it’s “close bureaucratic ranks and refuse to disclose.”

here’s what we do know:

from 2010 to 2016, 27,000 royalty payments were made to 1,800 NIH employees.
this was over $193 million in payments.

and i will wager they were shared out far from equally.

i’ll also wager the numbers are WAY up since then.

paul asked fauci directly

“have you ever received royalty money from any entity that you ever oversaw the distribution of money in research grants to?”

and he could not and would not answer the question. he tried to change the subject but failed. eventually we get:

“i don’t know as a fact, but i doubt it.”

not terribly confidence inspiring, is it.

Create meme "Cat (Cat , meme of ginger cat , cat skeptic )" - Pictures - Meme-arsenal.com

rand then asks

“how about you reveal how much you got and from what entities?”

“has anyone on the vaccine committee ever received money from companies that make vaccines?”

the response from tony:

“according to the regulations, people who receive royalties are not not required to divulge them even on their financial statement according to the bayh-dole act.”

got that?

NIH conflict of interest disclosures are explicitly not required as a matter of black letter law.

this is from the guy whose wife runs NIH ethics.

still want to trust these people?

he then gives a master class in incomplete disclosure.

from 2015 to 2020, his only royalties he got were for a monoclonal antibody used as a reagent. he claims it averaged $191 a year.

OK, but what about moderna? those would have likely started in 2021.

and what about the vaccine committee?

never addressed.

then gaveled out on time.

(and of course, this was a zoom meeting due to a well timed case of the trudeau flu)

look, whatever your politics, some bare modicum of transparency and accountability is required if anyone is going to have confidence in anyhting.

for NIH to hand out billions in grants and get kickback royalties from companies that get them is using taxpayer money to make personal investments, pure and simple.

how on earth this slid through as a policy is hard to credit, but apparently it happened in 1980 and has been law for 41 years.

it’s just another of the endless corruption arising from government self dealing.

police unions are pivotal in electing prosecutors and judges. so guess who give the coppers endless leeway around indictment and trial for misconduct?

the SEC and FDA are revolving doors to industry sinecure and greentech puts them both in the shade.

running the government as a crony corporatist career day for the alleged fiduciaries of america’s money and regulatory policy and seeing at as business as usual is a dangerous habituation.

if you look at any of it with fresh eyes, it’s horrifying. but instead we just let them do this, over and over.

but we all just got a very good look at how the technocratic sausage is made.

and most of america just went

so let’s not lose this moment.

this is the time to end this for good and all.

government gold givers dispensing largess taint every field they touch. the corruption is palpable and ubiquitous.

defund these agencies and return science to the scientists.

the politicians have been mucking it up long enough.

Viv Forde su Twitter: "“Time for honouring yourself will soon be at an end. Due to the pandemic.” - (I can think of one global leader that this applies to. I refuse

bad cattitude

interesting conflicts of interest at NIH