Editors’ Note:  This information seems to go even beyond what is called “regulatory capture.” Rule making agencies often lack expertise and hence tend to recruit personnel from the very companies they regulate. Progressives argued that “market failure” required the guiding hand of bureaucrats to correct abuses. However, in this case, regulators actually stand to profit from the companies they regulate, which calls into question conflicts of interest at the highest level. It is beyond just having a mindset favorable to industry, they stand to personally profit. Couple this with Congressmen and Senators making insider stock trades on companies they can influence through legislation. Who then regulates the corrupt regulators? This is corruption at the highest levels of our government, plain and simple, and shows the expected consequences of getting the government so deeply involved in providing healthcare. As Lord Acton long ago noted: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.

The two longtime directors of the National Institutes of Health and its National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci received 58 royalty payments from companies to license and deploy their products using taxpayer dollars, according to a new release from OpenTheBooks.

On Wednesday, the organization published more than 1500 pages of unredacted records revealing which companies were involved, and which NIH scientists were paid for inventions. The release came after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) battle with the NIH, reports Just the News.

The 56,000 transactions add up to more than $325 million, according to OpenTheBooks, though the individual amounts for each payment and corresponding license are not listed in the records.

Fauci received 37 payments from three companies between 2010-2021: 15 from Santa Cruz Biotechnology, which creates products for medical research including antibodies and made the fifth-most payments in the royalty database; 14 from Ancell Corp., which produces immunology tolls; and eight from Chiron Corp., acquired by Novartis in 2006. -JTN

According to the report, Novartis has received some $17 million in NIH contract payments and $15 million in NIH grants since the acquisition of Chiron. In 2004, Fauci’s NIAID had a contract with the company to develop an avian influenza vaccine.

Collins, meanwhile, who stepped down as NIH director at the end of 2021 before serving as President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 czar, received 21 payments from four companies between 2010 and 2018. Twelve of them came from GeneDX, which received $5 million in federal contract payments – mostly from NIH – since 2008…..

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