The National Institutes of Health received verified royalties amounting to $134 million from 2009-2014, with more yet to be revealed.
The NIH is in the midst of fulfilling a Freedom of Information Act request detailing the royalty payments of its various leaders since 2010.
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Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski announced the revelations on Monday. The nonprofit organization filed the FOIA request last September, receiving 1,200 pages of heavily redacted royalties from 2009-2014 that add up to 22,100 royalty payments to 17,000 NIH scientists. With the redaction, it is impossible to tell how much each scientist received, only the aggregate total of each department, which adds up to $134 million.
Another set of 1,800 royalty pages, meant to cover 2015-2020, has yet to be handed over to Open the Books, but it estimated that payments reached a total of $350 million by 2020. The nonprofit organization is also in a lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services for failing to comply with three FOIA requests, including this most recent one.
Andrzejewski claimed that the pages were finally produced as “the result of our federal lawsuit.”
Among the royalty recipients are National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, who received 23 royalty payments, 2009-2021 NIH Director Francis Collins, who was given 14 payments, and Fauci deputy Clifford Lane, who tallied 8 payments.
Andrzejewski’s organization is also seeking greater transparency regarding Fauci himself and filed a FOIA request in January 2021 to discover what his current job description consists of.
At first, the NIH only turned over 51 pages, but after being ordered by a U.S. district judge to respond to the request fully, it has begun handing over 300 pages a month since April.
A 2015 report found that over 900 NIH scientists received $9 million since 1997. The report prompted the institute to implement a policy to disclose royalty payments from then on.
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“Today, NIH is a revolving door of tens of billions of dollars in government grant-making coupled with hundreds of millions of dollars in private — non-transparent — royalty payments,” Andrzejewski wrote. “There needs to be a lot more sunshine on this potentially unholy alliance.”
NIH did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
