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May 11, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
22:05
Pharma Paid $350M to Fauci and NIH with Adam Andrzejewski
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Hey, everybody.
My guest today is Adam Angiewski, and he is the CEO and founder of OpenTheBooks.com.
And by the way, my voice, everybody, is really bad today, so bear with me.
Before dedicating his life to public service, Adam co-founded Homepage Directories, a $20 million publishing company.
He is a senior policy contributor at Forbes.
Adam has nearly 17 million page views on his 206 published investigations.
Fact-finding Fauci, which is his most recent publication, has led to the cancellation of his column, which was predictable.
I could have told you that was going to happen.
I wanted to have you on here, Adam, because you succeeded at doing something that I was trying to do while I researched my book, The Real Anthony Fauci, but was not able to do because NIA, and this is to find out how much in royalty payments Tony Fauci is actually getting and what What is the amount of royalty payments that are received by his deputies and by other people within that agency?
This is supposed to be a regulatory agency, and it's really almost dumbfounding that the people who are working there are collecting royalties on the products that they're supposed to be regulating.
The mercantile interests of those scientists and those public officials ends up wagging the regulatory dog and the mercantile functions at NIH, as we've seen over and over again.
Have been utterly subverted by these kind of mercantile ambitions of the people who work there on opportunities.
You were able, by litigating against NIH, you were able to get really the first real glimpse of what's happening with these royalty payments from the industry.
And it really is.
It's striking.
I think you found over $350 million in royalty payments to over 900 scientists who work for that agency.
So tell us what you found and tell us about the difficulty you've had in kind of dealing, getting NIH to come clean about this kickback scheme.
Let me call it that.
Is that fair to call it a kickback scheme?
Yeah.
Sure, I'm not sure what the legal definitions of the kickback scheme is, but it's definitely legalized and it's definitely a flow of payments to the tune.
Now we know, finally, and it's breaking on your show here, Robert, I so appreciate the platform.
Thank you very much for having me on.
Now we know that since fiscal year 2010 through fiscal year 2020 at NIH, there's been 1,675 scientists and we estimate, we can now estimate the payments of third-party royalties back to them at 350 million dollars.
So think about this.
We know that every single year NIH doles out 32 billion dollars worth of grants and there's 56,000 entities that receive a grant.
So tens of billions of dollars of grant making is going one way and now we know That hundreds of millions of dollars worth of third-party royalties are going the other way.
So here's the timeline and how we got to this.
Just so people know these terms, my third-party royalties, what we're talking about typically is that an NIH scientist will work on a drug and developing a drug and on developing the kind of regulation of that drug.
That drug will then be purchased by a pharmaceutical company and marketed.
And when they market that drug, the scientist at an NIH who worked on its development is entitled to a patent claim on that drug.
That will, as the pharmaceutical company that he's supposed to be regulating, is now paying money back to him for every time it sells a unit of that drug.
Exactly.
And this is why we call it an unholy alliance.
The royalty stream, this private royalty stream from these third-party payers, like you say, think pharmaceutical companies, back to the NIH scientists, this royalty stream has not received sunshine, has not received public oversight since 2005.
In 2005, the Associated Press was able to break open that database.
And what they found was That 918 scientists received $9 million that year.
The average payment per scientist was $9,700.
Well, now we know for the first time since 2005 that the stakes are a lot larger.
There's up to 1,700 scientists receiving up to $36 million a year, and the average payment per scientist is now $21,500.
So the amount of royalties in the aggregate is up four times, from $9 million to $36 million over the course of the last 17 years.
Let me ask an intervening question here.
NIH was very forthcoming with you in providing this information, right?
Yeah.
Well, that's a good question.
So here's the timeline.
Last September, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request with NIH for that royalty database.
We had looked for it on their website back in 2005.
They said they were going to post it every single year.
We couldn't find it, so we filed a FOIA for it.
They ignored it.
We received no response to our Federal Freedom of Information Act request, so we sued them in federal court at the end of October.
On judicially mandated production starting on February 1st, the agency admitted to holding 3,000 pages subject to our request.
3,000 pages of line-by-line royalties to scientists, and every single line in that database could be a potential conflict of interest.
So on February 1st, each month, they're producing 300 pages.
So now we've had four months of production, 1,200 pages, and now we can estimate, based on that production, what we're going to see in the entire file.
To date, on those four productions, it covers the fiscal years 2010 through 2014.
And there's $134 million worth of third-party royalties paid back to scientists.
And so based on that 40% production, we can conservatively estimate that we're going to see $350 million worth of royalties over the 11-year period from fiscal year 2010 through 2020.
Let me go back in time a little, because my memory, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, was that this system is the offspring, essentially, of the Bayh-Dole Act.
And that act, I think it was in 1980s.
Birch Bayh and Bob Dole answered legislation that was intended to allow universities to collect royalties on drugs and other products that they worked on in order to encourage deal flow, in order to incentivize universities to make scientific breakthroughs.
And the language of the act was rather ambiguous.
It allowed the federal officials at NIH to interpret the act so that government scientists could also collect royalties.
And that's my memory of it.
If you please correct me if I'm wrong.
By the way, I don't think anybody knew they were doing this until around 2002 when an AP reporter broke the story that Tony Fauci was involved in some shady experiments in Africa and Tennessee in which some people, the subjects that died with a very, very dangerous drug called, I think it was, as it turned out, he had a patent interest in that drug.
And they were defrauding the subjects of the experiment by the volunteers by not telling them about the dangers of the drugs.
So that was an AP story that came out, I think, around 2002 when they launched an investigation.
And for the first time, the American people in Congress realized that NIH scientists were actually collecting royalties on the drugs that they approved.
So between 1997 and 2004, Dr.
Anthony Fauci and his deputy, Clifford Lane, they collected $45,000 worth of royalties on an experimental AIDS discovery.
And so what happened with that was the AP was able to determine that the agency itself put $36 million of taxpayer money into the development of it.
And then you have the agency head, Anthony Fauci at NIAID, Collecting royalties and his deputy collecting royalties.
So this led to immediate conflict of interest questions.
Now Fauci's public statements and Clifford Lane's public statements from 2005 on this issue are very clear.
They also thought it was a conflict of interest.
As a matter of fact, Tony Fauci is on the record saying that he was going to donate his royalties to charity.
But at OpenTheBooks.com we have a simple phrase.
It's Says who with what proof?
The only proof that we would ever have that Tony Fauci is donating his royalties back is if he made his income tax statements available.
And of course, he's not going to do that.
Yeah, and we don't know.
There's a lot of questions, too.
When somebody says, well, I'm going to donate that to charity, does that mean they're donating it to their children's school or their children's education?
There's a lot of different charities that you could donate things to that actually redound back We're good to go.
He controls the ACIP committee at CDC. These are the committees that approve and then essentially mandate the vaccines and drugs.
Tony Fauci's investigators populate those committees.
He controls those committees.
So is he taking drugs that he has a market interest and a patent interest?
Running them through the approval process and then enriching himself at the end.
And we still do not know the answer to that question.
And we still don't know even from our litigation.
So although, Robert, we know the top line numbers will end up being around 350 million of these royalties over an 11 year period.
We still don't know the amount per scientist because NIH actually redacted the individual payments to scientists, and they also redacted the third-party payer's name.
So we know that Tony Fauci, between fiscal year 2010 and 2014, received 23 royalties.
We know that Francis Collins, who is the immediate past director of the National Institutes of Health, he received 14 royalty payments.
Clifford Lane, Fauci's deputy over at NIAID, he received eight payments, but we still don't know the amounts.
Because NIH has redacted the amounts, and we don't know who paid them because they redacted the name of the payer.
So this is still an unresolved conflict of interest.
Exactly.
So with our lawyers at Judicial Watch, we are going to make court filings to try to get those payments unredacted.
So look, this is a strategy over at the National Institutes of Health.
They've declared war on transparency.
They're using taxpayer dollars to try to keep taxpayers in the dark.
And here's the strategy.
Number one, they defy FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act request.
They just ignore them.
They force you to sue them.
And then it's expensive taxpayer-paid litigation.
And it's an unlimited checkbook for them because all of us, Robert...
Litigation is very expensive.
And then they use that lawsuit, and even on judicially mandated production, they stonewall, they slow walk, and they heavily redact the disclosures to force you into more litigation.
Again, they've got a deep pocket as taxpayers.
We're funding their side while we try to battle their side.
And then what we've seen with Dr.
Fauci is he'll just mislead Congress.
So, for instance, you know, in the Senate hearings on his finances, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, he referenced Forbes, he cited Forbes, which was my column.
Everybody will remember this Senate hearing because Fauci melted down on national television and he ended up on the hot mic calling the senator a moron after being questioned on his finances.
So he misled Congress.
He said his finances were public knowledge.
They're not.
were suing for a myriad of documents on his finances, including at the time his ethics disclosures.
And then what they do with their critics is they go after them.
They pressure their employers, and then they try to de-platform them.
That's the strategy at NIH, and that's my experience dealing with the National Institutes of Health.
I mean, at this point, we've seen that they did the same thing with the Wuhan lab, where they won't even show Congress the emails of their discussions about how they were going to cover up the links to the Wuhan lab and the funding of gain-of-function where they won't even show Congress the emails of their discussions At this point, do you look at NIH and say this is a predatory organization that is no longer promoting public health,
but is now promoting the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the technocracy that is ever expanding its power at but is now promoting the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the technocracy that is ever expanding its power Well, Robert, over the course of the last 20 years, the size, scope, and power of government at all levels has grown substantially.
And I think NIH is a perfect example of just how out of control it is at the federal level.
Each year, NIH doles out $32 billion worth of grant making.
We took a look at where that goes.
In a recent six-year period, the eight schools of the Ivy League.
Now, they've got a $200 billion endowment collectively between the eight schools of the Ivy League, but they received $10 billion in grants from the National Institutes of Health, just the Ivy League alone.
The National Institutes of Health have nearly 20,000 employees.
Now, why can't, with 20,000 employees that work for NIH, why can't they respond and produce documents subject to the Freedom of Information Act requests?
And it's by design, they don't want to.
And let's put this in perspective.
NIH employs 86 public affairs officers for an annual payroll, including benefits, of $15 million a year.
They have understaffed their FOIA production department.
For instance, during discovery on our federal lawsuit, we learned that they're behind on 633 FOIA requests.
They're past due on that.
They're being sued in addition to the two lawsuits we have against them.
They're being sued 33 times.
They're defying FOIA. They've got 20,000 employees, but they're fully staffed in PR. What did you learn from the documents describing Tony Fauci's finances that you were able to uncover?
So here's what we found.
Here's what the record shows.
Number one, we found that Dr.
Anthony Fauci is the number one most highly compensated federal employee.
He out-earns the president, four-star generals in the United States military.
He out-earns every single one of the 4.3 million bureaucrats at the federal level.
He made $456,000 last year.
Here's the second thing we found.
We found that Mrs.
Fauci, Christine Grady, out-earns the Vice President of the United States.
The third thing we found is that when Tony Fauci retires...
She works for NIH. She is the Chief Ethics Officer at NIH, which is an irony.
Let me just put it that way.
And I take it a step further.
The two Fauci's live a conflict of interest around the bioethics table, both at the breakfast table at home, at the office, and then at the dinner table back at home every single day.
For instance, in the Vanity Fair piece at the peak of the pandemic in July of 2020, Mrs.
Fauci admitted...
That she heads up the bioethics office.
They've got 30 bioethics researchers underneath her.
She was researching millions of angles related to the public policy response of COVID-19, including mandatory masking, vaccines, therapeutics like rendezivir, and all these other things.
She said millions of angles.
So on one hand, you've got Mrs.
Fauci doing the ethics reporting.
And on the other hand, you've got her husband putting together the public health response to COVID-19.
This needs to be a congressional investigation.
If we could get, and we're suing for it, Dr.
Anthony Fauci's contract, I think what we would find is that it has more waivers than when the Rolling Stones played Madison Square Garden.
And they better have a waiver for nepotism between him and his wife.
What do we know about his finances at this point?
Well, Dr.
Anthony Fauci, so in the Senate hearing, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall was able to get unredacted copies for the first time.
No one had seen these.
We were suing for this.
The 2019 and 2020 ethics disclosure and public financial reporting documents.
And as soon as they were disclosed, within 24 hours, I wrote my last column at Forbes.
And here was the top line.
The two Fauci's in 2020 during the pandemic year made $1.7 million between their public salaries and benefits, royalties, travel perks, and other benefits, and their investment gains.
They made $1.7 million in 2020.
They had a combined net worth rivaling $11 million.
And I think it's the old story.
You go to Washington, D.C. to do good, and you end up doing pretty well.
So what happened to you at Forbes?
Did you actually get fired at Forbes?
Well, I learned just how sensitive the Fauci financials are.
On a Sunday morning, six of the top people over at NIH... So it was two directors, two bureau chiefs, two of their top PR people.
They took time out from defending in January when Omicron was sweeping the country.
They took time out on a Sunday morning from defending the country against the pandemic to write a letter to Forbes, a media institution that's been around for 100 years.
They couched it as a corrections email.
But there were no substantial corrections.
It was basically a letter to say, put Andrzejewski on the bad list.
Forbes got the message quickly.
It's the last column I ever wrote.
NIH came down hard on Forbes.
Forbes came down hard on me.
And 10 days later, my column was canceled.
What's your attitude towards Forbes at this point?
You know, I've been there for about eight years, 206 pieces.
It was a good relationship.
But look, things changed when I wrote about Anthony Fauci.
So in January of 2021, when we found that he was the most highly compensated federal employee, things changed.
That column at Forbes has over 900,000 views.
But I don't think Forbes was happy about it.
In 2020, I put up 36 pieces.
26 of those were specially designated for promotion at Forbes called an editor's pick.
The first piece I put up in 2021 was on Fauci.
I put up 56 more reports, zero.
Zero times were my pieces ever, ever picked as an editor's pick going forward.
On the day my column was canceled, Forbes editors picked a column that Fauci's portrait will hang in the Smithsonian, and that was designated an editor's pick.
They kissed the ring, Robert.
Did you have a relationship with your editor there?
So I would really, I wouldn't hear from my editors for months and months at a time.
But my direct editor, yes, I had a good relationship with him for basically eight years.
And is there any embarrassment on his part about what happened to him?
So my rank-and-file direct report editor, I left him, when I put up my story about how fact-finding Fauci led to my cancellation at Forbes, I redacted his name because he wasn't at the executive level.
I only left the Forbes executive names in there, and I always had a good relationship with my direct report editor.
Andrew Angiewski, thank you very much for your inquisitive mind, for your courage, and for finally getting at the answer to some of these questions.
I hope you'll come back on the show and talk to us when you finally find out exactly how much he's making.
We're going to shake it like a rat terrier, Robert.
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