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May 13, 2022 - Epoch Times

14:10

UPDATE: Director Admits that $350M in Secret Royalty Payments Has Appearance of Conflict-of-Interest

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	Good evening, and to start, I wanted to quickly mention that yesterday, I published a super spicy episode over on Epic TV. That particular episode had to do with a study that was published by researchers over in Sweden, and in that study, which was conducted on a Petri dish, they found that the synthetic mRNA within the Pfizer vaccine injected into liver cells actually reverse transcribes itself into human DNA, something that for well over a year now, the health experts and fact-checkers said could not possibly happen.
	Now, there's a lot of nuance to that particular story.
	However, frankly, nuance is not really welcome here on YouTube.
	And so if you'd like to check out that exclusive episode, I'll throw a link to it.
	It'll be right there at the very top of the description box.
	And now, let's dive into the main topic of today's discussion, which has to do with the fact that just yesterday, the current director of the NIH, he admitted that the hundreds of millions of dollars in secret royalty payments going to men like Dr.
	Fauci and Dr.
	Collins...
	Now, let me back up for a moment and set the stage for you regarding the NIH director's statement.
	About a week ago, a government watchdog group called Open the Books.
	They released a, you can say, fairly bombshell report regarding secret royalty payments that were made to the NIH. Specifically, they were able to obtain records from the NIH, and it turns out that over the past 10 years, Doctors Fauci, Dr.
	Collins, other top NIH executives, as well as hundreds of the agency's scientists and research, they were paid out in total approximately $350 million in secret royalty payments from both pharmaceutical companies as well as from other private firms.
	Now, we discussed those payments in more detail on a previous episode.
	I'll throw the card up there in the top right corner if you want to check it out.
	But to give you a brief summary of what happened, here was specifically what the government watchdog group, Open the Books, wrote in their report.
	"We estimate that up to $350 million went to all of the scientists who smashed that like button, as well as those who subscribed to the Facts Matter YouTube channel." Now of course, I'm just kidding, but I do hope that you smash that like and subscribe button.
	Regardless, here's what the report actually said: "We estimate that up to $350 million in royalties from third parties were paid to NIH scientists during the fiscal years between 2010 and 2020.
	We draw that conclusion because in the first five years, there has been $134 million that we have been able to quantify of top-line numbers that flowed from third-party payers, meaning pharmaceutical companies or other payers, to NIH scientists.
	Then, further down in this report, they share their findings regarding some of the payments received by the NIH leadership.
	Here's what they wrote, quote, We now know that there are 1,675 scientists that received payments during that period, at least one payment.
	In fiscal year 2014, for instance, $36 million was paid out, and that is, on average, $21,100 per scientist.
	We also find that during this period, And then, in case you're wondering why exactly all these government employees are receiving royalty payments from different pharmaceutical companies, well, the report summarizes the reason quite succinctly.
	Quote, when an NIH employee makes a discovery in their official capacity, the NIH owns the rights to any resulting patent.
	These patents are then licensed for commercial use to companies that could use them to bring products to market.
	Employees are listed as inventors on the patents and receive a share of the royalties obtained through any licensing or technology transfer of their inventions.
	Essentially, taxpayer money funding NIH research benefits researchers employed by the NIH because they are listed as patent inventors and therefore receive royalty payments from licensees.
	Now, that all sounds well and good and it could potentially spur scientific innovation.
	However, as we discussed in our previous episode, this presents two main problems.
	The first is the possibility of a conflict of interest when you have the leadership of the agency receiving royalty payments from the very companies that they are supposed to be regulating.
	And in fact, this problem only became more exacerbated two years ago with the onset of COVID because of the fact that the government holds several COVID-related patents.
	And so, who is exactly getting this money?
	And how much are they actually getting become incredibly important questions.
	However, the answers to those questions, well, they are hidden behind the second problem with this whole system, which is the fact that this watchdog report goes on to explain that the government has become less and less transparent over time, meaning that even with the documents that they were able to obtain from the NIH, a lot of the information was actually redacted.
	Including which scientists were paid, exactly how much money they were paid, which companies were paying them, as well as what the exact patent they were being paid for.
	And so, with all of this as the background, just yesterday, Dr.
	Lawrence Tabak, who is currently the head of the NIH, he sat down before a congressional committee in order to answer questions.
	And during the back and forth, he admitted that these secret royalty payments to doctors like Fauci, Collins, and others have the appearance of a conflict of interest.
	Here's the relevant exchange between Dr.
	Tabak and a congressman named John Molinar.
	But if the agency is awarding who the beneficiary of the grant, who's doing the trial, and there are somehow finances involved, that there's a financial benefit that could be accrued if someone's patent or invention is considered valid, do you not see that as a conflict or an appearance of a conflict of information?
	I certainly can understand that it might seem as an appearance, and it's the sort of thing that maybe we Could work together on so that we can explain to you the firewalls that we do have in place, because they are significant and substantial.
	However, even if the firewalls preventing corruption are as safe and secure as Dr.
	Tabag says they are, Well, it still leaves the issue of transparency, because the data which is publicly available is heavily redacted, so that we don't know which company is paying which NIH executive, we don't know how much money they're being paid, and we don't even know what patent the money is supposedly for, essentially leaving us, the American taxpayers, completely in the dark.
	Which is a sentiment that was echoed by Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.
	She's a Republican, and here's what she told our reporter here at the Epoch Times.
	The NIH is a dark money pit.
	They covered up grants for gain-of-function research in Wuhan, so it is no surprise that they are now refusing to release critical data regarding allegations of millions in royalty fees paid to in-house scientists like Dr. Fauci.
	If the NIH wants to keep spending taxpayer dollars, they have a responsibility to provide transparency.
	And by the way, just as a super quick aside, the reason that all the Congress members that I'm quoting are Republicans is because of the reality that we found ourselves in, Where, here at the Epoch Times at least, we reached out to all the leaders on the congressional committees that have oversight over the NIH. However, the Democrats have largely remained silent on the issue of these secret royalty payments.
	None of them have either made public statements regarding these royalty payments or gotten back to us for comment.
	Now, I'm not making any partisan judgments here.
	I'm just quite literally stating the facts.
	Regardless, though, here's what Congressman Greg Stubbe, a Republican from Florida, here's what he told us.
	Of course, it's a direct conflict of interest for scientists like Dr.
	Anthony Fauci to rake in $350 million in royalties from third parties who benefit from federal taxpayer-funded grants.
	Anthony Fauci is a millionaire that has gotten rich off taxpayer dollars.
	He's a prime example of the bloated federal bureaucracy.
	This royalty system should be examined to ensure it isn't making matters worse.
	However, according to Mr.
	Mike Howell, who is a veteran congressional lawyer as well as a congressional investigator, he told us here at the Epoch Times that it looks like there's a potential on the horizon to get to the bottom of these hundreds of million dollars worth of secret royalty payments.
	But it all depends on how the midterm elections play out.
	Here's specifically what he told us.
	Now, there is something else that I've always personally wondered, and maybe you have as well.
	Which is, how exactly do these secret royalty payments present a conflict of interest?
	And by that, what I mean is not theoretically, but in practice.
	How does all the money actually flow from the pharmaceutical companies to the different government agencies?
	And so, in order to answer that question, while I was down in Texas and interviewing Dr.
	Ryan Cole, I asked him to explain this all in detail.
	And what he said was, sorry, do you hear the sound of a coin flipping?
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	And now, while I was down in Texas a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Dr.
	Ryan Cole, who is both an American pathologist as well as the founder of Cole Diagnostics.
	And during our very long discussion, one of the things I asked them was to explain exactly how the money flows between the different pharmaceutical companies and their relevant government agencies.
	Take a listen.
	So, in order to get a drug onto the market, these companies do spend tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in clinical trials and numerous patients to show, is my drug safe?
	Isn't my drug safe?
	Then they take that data and they show to the FDA, look, we've done all these steps.
	Well, in order for the FDA to review those, they have reviewers and they have teams.
	That costs money.
	The FDA only gets so much from the government.
	The rest of it comes from these agencies in their application and licensing fees.
	Well, it's become kind of this revolving door of money and costs and studies to where it's basically a machine that has built itself over time.
	It's the end result of too many years of bad rules and regulations that have allowed basically the industry's foot to be in the door of a quasi-federal agency.
	And so because of that, it's really, again, goes back to that lack of oversight or lack of rules that say, look, this has overstepped the bounds of power or balance of power.
	Pharma shouldn't be invested that much in this agency.
	And so you have people in these agencies like, oh, gosh, they paid this much.
	We better at least give them a really good look, wink, wink.
	So it's an unfortunate intertwining of their own interest to continue to exist as the FDA to have enough funds to exist.
	So nobody's going to vote themselves out of a job in these agencies.
	By denying these applications and application fees and drug reviews for all these large companies, They won't have enough revenue to keep their agency going either.
	It's really, I mean, it's a paradoxical lose-lose.
	The example you gave, the pharma company spends, let's say, $10 million or $50 million on their own trial.
	Then they hand the data to the FDA. The FDA, in order to review it, part of the money comes from the federal government, but whatever it needs to be made up, that money comes from fees from the company that's asking to be reviewed?
	Correct.
	Correct.
	Interesting.
	And they're providing their own research data.
	Where's the third party?
	Because what happens in a lot of these drug applications, it's the fox guarding the hen house.
	They want their data to look good.
	So you may have heard of like Brooke Jackson, who was on one of the Pfizer trials down in Texas, 20 years of trial experience.
	She saw data being fudged internally, blew the whistle, And was promptly fired from, and a lot of these companies don't even do their own research.
	They subcontract it out to other companies.
	So there's not even a third independent party looking at that data that eventually gets submitted to the FDA. And some of these very large corporations, they don't even do a trial.
	They subcontract it to a bunch of little companies, trusting that all that data will be right.
	And then there's enough data that they can obscure and tweak and twist that data to make their product look good, knowing that in the end they're going to get the approval that they seek.
	Then they hand it off to ghostwriters at universities who don't do any of the work and they say, hey, make this data look good, write our paper for us.
	And they'll pay them five, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty thousand dollars to write a paper for one of the big journals and or for the FDA to make their product and their data look right.
	Now that was only a small snippet of the entire interview.
	It goes without saying that the entire interview cannot be found here on YouTube.
	And so I'll throw a link to it.
	It'll be down in the description box below.
	You can click on it and watch it over on Epic TV. Also, all the relevant documents that we discussed in today's episode will also be down there in the description box below this video if you want to dig into them for yourself.
	And all I ask in return is that if you haven't already, take a quick moment to smash, smash, smash that like button as well as that subscribe button if you haven't already if you want to get these type of videos, type of news content delivered directly to your YouTube feed every single weekday.
	And then lastly, as I mentioned at the very beginning of today's episode, yesterday I published a super spicy episode, an exclusive episode of Facts Matter over on Epic TV, wherein we dug deep into a Swedish study that found that the synthetic mRNA within the Pfizer vaccine, once injected into a liver cell line, it actually reverse transcribed itself into human DNA. And the reason that's so important is because for well over a year now, the different health experts and fact checkers have said that this was a possibility that couldn't possibly occur.
	However, there is a ton of nuance to that particular study, and I go through it point by point in that exclusive episode, which, frankly, again, cannot be found here on YouTube.
	If you want to check it out, I'll throw a link to it.
	It'll be at the very top of the description box.
	And until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epoch Times.

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