But the moment the NIH stops being transparent about how our hard-earned tax money is spent is when the American people should start reconsidering.
A May 1 letter from the three congressional leaders to NIH Acting Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak requested information on NIH’s oversight of research on potentially risky activities, for example, experimental virus mutation or manipulation involving SARS, MERS, or SARS CoV-2.
“It has been over three months, and the Committee has no meaningful evidence that the NIH is responding to this request,” the post reads.
NIH’s stonewalling of legitimate congressional requests is effectively asking for budget cuts. If Congress doesn’t receive prompt answers from the NIH, our representatives’ fiduciary responsibility to the American people is to force the issue by subpoenaing all relevant NIH records.
An NIH budget decrease is now under consideration, with House Republicans proposing what amounts to a small-bore shot across the bow—a 7.4 percent cut totaling $3.8 billion.
This comes in the context of a new taxpayer watchdog report that details $325 million in royalty payments to the NIH over 11 years from outside entities, including big pharma and bio companies in Russia and China.
Thirty-four Chinese companies, including a state-owned enterprise in Wuhan, China, are licensing NIH technologies. In 2016, that company “moved its headquarters next to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where risky ‘gain-of-function’ research funded by the U.S. government may have led to the outbreak of the pandemic,” according to the New York Post.
Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of OpenTheBooks, which released the Aug. 9 report, argued that Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, supported the NIH’s “culture of secrecy.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has referred Dr. Fauci to the Department of Justice for allegedly lying to Congress regarding government funding of labs in China.
The foreign payments to NIH employees shake public confidence in the institutes and are a national security issue as they introduce a foreign conflict of interest to NIH leaders, managers, and scientists who might not be as alert to misuse as they otherwise should be.
A Russian company, Pokrov Biologics Plant, reportedly made payments to scientists at both the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Pokrov is a vaccine company for farm animals that was an alleged front for bioweapons/dangerous pathogens with Soviet ties,” Mr. Andrzejewski said.
Royalties paid to individual NIH scientists and managers include as much as $150,000 per year each, on top of their regular salaries. The NIH reportedly resisted Freedom of Information Act requests for details about the $325 million.
According to the report, former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, along with thousands of other government scientists, including Dr. Fauci, benefitted from such royalties from 2009 to 2020.
“Several of those royalties came from companies that in turn received federal contracts and grants, prompting concerns about conflicts of interest,” the New York Post stated. “Collins, for instance, took licensing payments from at least four firms that have been awarded nearly $50 million from the U.S. government since 2008.”
A related national security risk from the NIH’s $51.1 billion proposed budget is a federal debt that becomes so onerous as to make fighting the next pandemic or war difficult, if not impossible.
The federal government is now borrowing so much as to potentially incur federal interest payments amounting to a whopping 80 percent of individual income tax revenues by 2033.
The Wall Street Journal stated: “Say you added just 1 percentage point to the average interest rate in the [Congressional Budget Office’s] forecast and kept every other number unchanged. That would result in an additional $3.5 trillion in federal debt by 2033. The government’s annual interest bill alone would then be about $2 trillion. For perspective, individual income taxes are set to bring in only $2.5 trillion this year.”
As the risks from NIH grow, the culture of secrecy continues, and interest due on the federal debt compounds, it’s time to look for more budget cuts. Let’s start with the NIH programs supported by scientists quietly double-dipping in adversary countries such as Russia and China.
