NIH Scientists in the Pay of Big Pharma

Conflict of Interest? There's no conflict of interest. Nothing to see here. Move along! Rand Paul's questioning Dr. Fauci's NIH royalty payments is right

The institute and its dozens of sub-agencies dole out roughly 32 billion worth of tax dollars annually in the form of research grants to pharmaceutical companies and the healthcare community, but they also receive a hidden stream of private royalty payments for their innovations.

The institute and roughly 1,800 of its scientists have received an estimated $350-$400 million in these payments, from entities like pharmaceutical companies, during the last decade. The public would have remained in the dark about this, but OpenTheBooks.com sued for the information after NIH ignored and denied lawful open records requests. Despite being forced to release the information, NIH is still redacting the amount of each individual payment, and which company paid it. Each royalty check is a potential conflict of interest left unexamined.

Go read the whole thing, about how the NIH ignored Freedom of Information Act requests, about lawsuits, about what Rand Paul is doing and how Congress is finally waking up to their "oversight" responsibility.

What really shocked me about this story was to see an opinion piece in The Cincinnati Enquirer that had good things to say about Senator Paul. I haven't read The Enquirer regularly in more than 20 years, mostly because they were slightly to the Left of Chairman Mao back then. Which is why, even though this story is almost a month old, I decided I should share it with you. And it plays into the next post as well.