During the pandemic, the American people started to feel that Big Government was very cozy with Big Pharma.
Now we know just how close they were.
New data from the National Institutes of Health reveal the agency and its scientists collected $710 million in royalties during the pandemic, from late 2021 through 2023. These are payments made by private companies, like pharmaceuticals, to license medical innovations from government scientists.
Almost all that cash — $690 million — went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and 260 of its scientists.
Information about this vast private royalty complex is tightly held by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). My organization, OpenTheBooks.com, was forced to sue to uncover the royalties paid from September 2009 to October 2021, which amounted to $325 million over 56,000 transactions.
We had to sue a second time, with Judicial Watch as our counsel, to pry open this new release.
Payments skyrocketed during the pandemic era: Those years saw more than double the amount of cash flow to NIH from the private sector, compared to the prior 12 combined. All told, it’s $1.036 billion.
It’s unclear if any of the COVID vaccine royalties from Pfizer and Moderna, the latter of which settled with NIH by agreeing to pay $400 million, is even included in these new numbers. NIH isn’t saying.
The American people have one last crack at getting some candor from Fauci, the face of our COVID response, when he testifies Monday before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
There’s plenty to answer for. --->READ MORE HERE
As the COVID-19 pandemic fades, many arts organizations have yet to fully recover.
Nonprofit theater companies are some of the hardest hit groups, as audiences are slow to return and inflation continues to cut into budgets.
Now, Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-Oregon), along with Senators Peter Welch (D-Vermont), John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania), and Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) are hoping to help organizations that are no longer receiving emergency pandemic funding but are still struggling to stay afloat.
The group introduced legislation in April called the “Supporting Theater and the Arts to Galvanize the Economy Act of 2024,” or STAGE Act.
For Bonamici, the “galvanize the economy” part of the name is especially crucial.
“When we invest in the creative economy, we see the whole community change,” Bonamici said in a call last week. “My office is in Beaverton at The Round and when the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts opened, it was incredible what that did. Now there are restaurants and gathering spaces and people coming together.”
People who go to the theater also go to bars and restaurants, she said, spending money in the area. And for Bonamici, economic development of this kind goes hand in hand with building community.
“The arts can be very healing and we need that a lot,” she said. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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