Corruption: NIH Scientists Received $350 Million in Secret Royalties from Drug Companies
Government Scientists have also been paid big bucks to hide data
Between 2010 and 2020, the National Institutes of Health and hundreds of individual scientists collected an estimated $350 million in undisclosed royalty payments from third parties—primarily pharmaceutical companies. The actual figure is likely higher, as four agencies have completely redacted their royalty records.
This isn’t speculation. This is documented.
Government watchdog Open the Books filed Freedom of Information Act requests, got stonewalled, sued the NIH for noncompliance, and finally pried the documentation loose. Even then, the records came back heavily redacted. The agency that sets medical policy for 330 million Americans fought tooth and nail to keep these payments hidden from the public funding its operations.
The structure works like this: NIH employees conduct research using taxpayer dollars. When they make discoveries, the NIH owns the resulting patents. Those patents get licensed to pharmaceutical companies. The scientists listed as inventors receive royalty payments from the licensing deals. Taxpayer-funded research enriches the researchers conducting it, with money flowing from the same companies those researchers are supposed to regulate objectively.
“Because those payments enrich the agency and its scientists, each and every royalty payment could be a potential conflict of interest and needs disclosure,” Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski stated.
He’s right. And the NIH knows it.
The Numbers Tell the Story
During a May 2022 news conference, Andrzejewski reported that payments between 2010 and 2014 accounted for 40% of the total payouts. During those years, 1,675 scientists received secret royalties averaging $21,100 per person.
The National Cancer Institute led the pack. NCI employees collected nearly $113 million between 2010 and 2014. The five NIH employees receiving the greatest number of payments all worked for NCI: Robert Gallo, Ira Pastan, Mikulas Popovic, Flossie Wong-Staal, and Mangalasseril Sarngadharan.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—the agency that shaped America’s COVID response—and its leadership received more than $9.3 million. Francis Collins, who served as NIH director until late 2021, received 14 payments. Dr. Anthony Fauci received 23 payments. His deputy, Clifford Lane, received eight.
These are the same officials who told Americans which treatments worked and which didn’t. The same officials who shaped vaccine policy. The same officials who dismissed early treatment protocols while collecting checks from pharmaceutical companies.
The appearance problem is obvious. During a May 2022 House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan confronted acting NIH director Dr. Lawrence Tabak directly:
“Right now, I think the NIH has a credibility problem and this only feeds into this. People in my district say, ‘Well, so-and-so has a financial interest,’ or they don’t like ivermectin because they aren’t benefitting from that royalty. You may have very sound scientific reasons for recommending a medicine or not, but the idea that people get a financial benefit from certain research that’s been done and grants that were awarded, that is, to me, the height of the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
Tabak admitted the undisclosed royalty payments present “an appearance of a conflict of interest” and don’t appear ethical. He insisted the agency wouldn’t make drug recommendations based on anything other than science.
The public has no way to verify that claim. The payments are hidden. The relationships are obscured. The decision-making process is opaque. We’re asked to trust institutions that actively conceal information the public has a right to see.
The Disclosure System Is Designed to Hide
The NIH didn’t just fail to disclose these payments voluntarily. The agency built systems that actively obscure them.
NIH financial disclosure forms define third-party royalty payments as income received from the NIH itself. This means when a scientist reports income, the royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies appear as NIH income—not as payments from the drug makers who might benefit from that scientist’s regulatory decisions.
This isn’t an oversight. It’s architecture.
In 2005, the Associated Press investigated NIH royalty payments and reported details on who received what, and from whom. That information was public then. Today, with payments significantly larger and conflicts correspondingly greater, those same details are kept secret.
As the British Medical Journal noted at the time: “A patient advocacy group, the Alliance for Human Research Protection, says that patients might have thought differently about the risks of trial treatment if they knew of scientists’ financial interests.”
Patients enrolling in clinical trials have a right to know whether the researchers running those trials have financial stakes in the outcomes. The public has a right to know whether officials recommending treatments are getting paid by the companies making them. These aren’t radical positions. They’re basic transparency requirements that NIH has systematically evaded.
FOIA Noncompliance Has Become the Default
When Open the Books initially filed its FOIA request for royalty payment data, the NIH simply declined to respond. The agency ignored the legal requirement to produce records. Only after a lawsuit forced compliance did any documentation emerge—and it arrived heavily redacted.
This pattern has become standard operating procedure.
Jason Foster, president of Empower Oversight, described the problem in an April 2022 Newsweek piece: “Last November my organization, Empower Oversight, sued the National Institutes of Health for failing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests related to the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around half a dozen other entities have also been forced to go to court to compel the NIH to make pandemic documents public.”
Foster identified the strategic purpose behind this noncompliance: “By forcing public interest groups to spend this money on litigation before complying with Freedom of Information Act requests, the NIH is locking out the vast majority of Americans from accessing federal records. It takes financial resources to most effectively probe how our government operates.”
Good lawyers charge hundreds of dollars per hour. Litigation is expensive and time-consuming. Organizations without substantial resources cannot force compliance. The NIH knows this. By ignoring FOIA requirements until sued, the agency creates a financial barrier that blocks most oversight attempts.
Everyone pays for this obstruction. Court time and expenses add up. Department of Justice lawyers get involved. The entire process costs more than simple compliance would. But the NIH apparently considers those costs worthwhile if they keep information hidden.
What Forced Disclosures Have Revealed
The lawsuits that did succeed have exposed exactly why the NIH wanted these records buried.
The Intercept sued and obtained correspondence confirming the NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Those same emails revealed the NIH allowed EcoHealth Alliance to craft the language governing this dangerous research—even though the NIH is supposed to regulate EcoHealth’s work.
Other public interest groups, including Knowledge Ecology International and Public Citizen, sued to determine NIH’s role in developing COVID-19 therapies. These requests matter because taxpayers subsidized vaccines for which we paid premium prices.
Forced disclosures also proved the NIH has been redacting information under false pretenses.
In documents released to Buzzfeed after litigation, the NIH redacted part of an email citing exemption code 7(A), which permits withholding records compiled for law enforcement purposes when disclosure could interfere with enforcement proceedings. Later, when senators requested the same records, that passage was left unredacted.
The redacted sentence? EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak telling Fauci about “work we’ve been doing in collaboration with Chinese virologists.”
There was no law enforcement purpose. The NIH simply wanted its collaboration with Chinese virologists kept secret. The agency used a law enforcement exemption to hide information that had nothing to do with law enforcement.
Internal records also revealed that then-NIH director Francis Collins was personally reviewing and clearing FOIA requests during the pandemic. As Foster noted, this was “an odd use of time by the director of a public health agency in the midst of a pandemic.”
Unless, of course, the priority was controlling what information reached the public.
EcoHealth Alliance Covered Up Lethal Experiments
While royalty payment disclosures gained attention, congressional investigators uncovered a separate cover-up involving EcoHealth Alliance’s animal experiments.
Documents obtained by the White Coat Waste Project through FOIA revealed that in 2016, NIAID staffers worried EcoHealth’s experiments violated the government’s gain-of-function research moratorium. The moratorium was supposed to halt research that made viruses more transmissible, more lethal, more dangerous.
NIAID didn’t stop the project. Instead, the agency offered EcoHealth the opportunity to create its own policy governing the dangerous research, then allowed the experiments to proceed.
EcoHealth promised NIAID it would stop experiments and immediately report if the engineered coronaviruses showed viral growth greater than 10 times that of the original virus. The novel coronaviruses grew 10,000 times stronger. The mice became severely ill. EcoHealth did not properly report the increased virulence, violating its own grant terms.
House investigators led by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers discovered EcoHealth hid far more than previously known. Her letter to NIH noted that EcoHealth reported infected mice had only “mild” clinical symptoms when the actual death rate was 75%.
EcoHealth obscured this mortality by deleting the word “dead” from the phrase “dead point” on a graph that appeared in earlier reports. The omission made it appear mice were simply carrying more virus rather than dying in large numbers.
Congressional investigators concluded EcoHealth’s omission was not accidental and was “intended to deceive peer reviewers.” Reviewers who knew the truth likely “would have wanted to stop such risky research and not continue EcoHealth’s funding.”
The regulated entity wrote its own rules. Then it broke those rules. Then it lied about breaking them. The regulator either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
CDC’s Disinformation Problem
Internal CDC documents and emails obtained through FOIA requests reveal similar patterns of obfuscation and cover-up.
In December 2020, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices issued a report claiming the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine had “consistent high efficacy” of 92% or more among people with evidence of previous SARS-CoV-2 infection. Based on this claim, the CDC urged everyone—including those who had recovered from COVID—to get vaccinated.
Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican and award-winning scientist, reviewed the actual Pfizer trial data. The data showed no efficacy among participants with previous COVID infection. The Moderna trial showed no proof of efficacy for this population either.
The ACIP’s claim was false.
Massie contacted the CDC multiple times to correct the error. CDC deputy director Dr. Anne Schuchat eventually acknowledged the mistake and said it would be fixed. When the CDC issued its “correction” at the end of January 2021, the error remained. The agency simply rephrased the false claim differently, still misleadingly suggesting vaccination was effective for those previously infected.
Emails obtained through FOIA reveal Massie’s discussions sparked internal panic. More than 1,000 pages of emails mention his concern that the CDC was putting out disinformation and misleading the public. Many emails are completely redacted. The CDC fought to keep these internal discussions hidden.
Some officials tried to defend the false information by highlighting paragraphs that might justify vaccinating people with natural immunity. But the original claim—that trial data showed high efficacy in this population—remained false.
Nobody was held accountable. The false information stood for weeks before even the inadequate “correction” appeared. Millions of Americans made medical decisions based on inaccurate claims from their own public health agency.
Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson also reported that the CDC has been tracking and logging CDC-related tweets by members of Congress. The purpose of this surveillance remains unclear.
Where This Leaves Us
The NIH collects secret payments from drug companies while setting policy on those companies’ products. When asked for transparency, it stonewalls until sued. When forced to produce documents, it redacts strategically.
The CDC publishes false efficacy claims, refuses to correct them properly, and tracks congressional social media posts about its activities. EcoHealth Alliance writes its own oversight rules, violates them, hides the violations, and continues receiving federal funding.
These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re patterns.
Rep. Neal Dunn of Florida told The Epoch Times: “It’s no secret that the agency needs reform. Their many issues were exacerbated and highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Providing the public with transparent access to how the NIH is spending taxpayer dollars and reaching their decisions is a basic responsibility, and they must be held accountable.”
The question is whether reform is possible or whether the institutional rot runs too deep. Agencies designed to protect public health have been captured by the industries they regulate. Officials who should serve the public interest serve their own financial interests instead.
The American people fund these agencies. The American people deserve to know how their money gets spent, who profits from it, and whether the officials making recommendations have financial stakes in those recommendations.
The NIH, CDC, and FDA have failed their basic transparency obligations. They’ve hidden conflicts of interest. They’ve misled the public. They’ve fought disclosure at every turn.
Anyone who still trusts these institutions to provide objective public health guidance should examine the evidence. The royalty payments are real. The cover-ups are documented. The conflicts of interest are structural.
Trust is earned through transparency. These agencies have chosen secrecy. Draw your own conclusions about what they’re hiding and why.