Dr. Anthony Fauci and staff at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should reveal any royalties they received from pharmaceutical companies, according to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
The Kentucky Republican expressed that the issue of federal employees being rewarded financially by pharma giants is something he’s been “concerned about for years” as he spoke with Fox News Digital about his Royalty Transparency Act of 2024.
“During COVID, we had vaccines that were developed by Pfizer and Moderna. And then these vaccines were mandated on people throughout government, throughout the military, by different governors around the country, and yet, we don’t know whether the people that were approving either the vaccines or the mandates were receiving money from big Pharma,” he said in an interview Thursday.
“This is something that I inquired when I had [Dr.] Anthony Fauci in our committee,” Paul said of the former NIH director. “I’d said, you know, we need to know this, this is a basic conflict of interest problem, and he basically thumbed his nose at the American people.”
The Royalty Transparency Act calls for an online database where the public can see information about royalties paid out to federal employees On Wednesday, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously passed the bill in markup.
According to the senator, the bill will allow members of the public “to know whether or not any of the people” approving drugs are “receiving money from the same companies that manufacture the vaccines.”
Fox News reported:
For decades, there’s been controversy surrounding the transparency of National Institutes of Health (NIH) royalty payouts because they have refused to disclose how much its researchers are getting paid.
NIH scientists have reportedly received $400 million in royalty payouts from third-party companies for medical inventions they produced. Some were even found to be linked to foreign entities, including the Chinese Communist Party.
Last summer, the government watchdog group OpenTheBooks found that more than 1,800 government scientists collected 27,244 royalty payments totaling hundreds of millions of dollars from 2009 to 2016.
“So, it’s not a small amount of money,” Paul said. “It’s a significant amount of money … to scientists, and so some of them are getting million-dollar paydays from big pharmacy companies, and it’s not being disclosed to the public.”
