Power of the Purse: NIH Distributes Billions for Research and Studies

Power of the Purse: NIH Distributes Billions for Research and Studies
by Lori Weintz at Brownstone Institute

[The following is an excerpt from Lori Weintz’s book, Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19.]

“The practice of medicine has been corrupted.”

–Dr. Pierre Kory, Pulmonary and Critical Care Specialist, Founder FLCCC

There’s that old saying, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare unhealthy power structures that were already in place, but were operating largely unnoticed by most people just going about their daily lives. 

Every year, the National Institutes of Health distributes billions of dollars in grants and contracts for research and studies. In 2022 NIH research grants totaled $33.3 billion. RFK,. Jr reports that “Between 2010 and 2016, every single drug that won approval from the FDA – 210 different pharmaceuticals – originated, at least in part, from research funded by the NIH.” The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is the named owner of at least 4,400 patents. Under an HHS policy, NIAID employees can earn up to $150k annually from drugs they help develop at taxpayer’s expense. (TRAF, p. 120- 121)

Don’t cross Fauci if you want funding from NIH for your research:

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded…[I]n holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 1961

At the same time Big Pharma is granted taxpayer money for product development, scientists and researchers who need funding for research are largely dependent on being in the good graces of those who hold the purse strings at NIH. In a 2006 Harper’s article, Celia Farber exposed the corruption and vendetta-driven system, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci for 40 years, that has made NIAID an appendage of Big Pharma. 

RFK, Jr. explains that with billions of dollars at his disposal, Dr. Fauci has had the “power to make and break careers, enrich – or punish – university research centers, manipulate scientific journals, and to dictate not just the subject matter and study protocols, but also the outcome of scientific research across the globe.” 

“During his half-century as America’s Health Czar,” continues Kennedy, “Dr. Fauci has played a central role in crafting a world where Americans pay the highest prices for medicine and suffer worse health outcomes compared to other wealthy countries. 

Adverse drug reactions are among the nation’s top four leading causes of death, after cancer and heart attacks.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci, p. 119

Farber notes that “genuine scientists” are in the minority under the system Fauci nurtured and passed on to the next generation of regulators. These genuine scientists “look, sound, and behave like scientists. And to varying degrees, they all live in a climate of both economic and reputational persecution…Fauci’s vendetta system has many ways of crushing the natural scientific impulse – to question and to demand proof.” (TRAF, p. 118-119)

The silencing of dissident voices harms science and medicine:

There is perhaps nothing that opens the door to censorship wider than the fear of disease and the prospect of an early death. Indeed, there is nothing that matches a looming pandemic to generate fear. And there is nothing like fear to grease the skids of censorship.

-Jay Bhattacharya and Steven H Hanke, September 7, 2023

For example, in October 2020 three prominent epidemiologists, one each from Stanford, Yale, and Oxford, issued the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) calling for an end to the devastating Covid lockdowns. The GBD highlighted the inhumane impact of lockdowns on the poor and vulnerable, and called for a return to traditional pandemic response of “focused protection.” Namely, allowing society to open back up and normal life to continue, while taking actions to protect the elderly and immune-compromised, who were the only cohorts for which Covid-19 was a serious threat. In this manner herd immunity would be reached more quickly, which would in turn provide more protection for the at-risk.

Rather than opening a discussion to consider the legitimate concerns and proposals of these prominent professionals, Dr. Fauci and then-FDA director Francis Collins labeled them “fringe epidemiologists” and called for a “quick and devastating takedown” of them, and their ideas. They were successful. The term “herd immunity” was redefined as a “strategy” of allowing the virus to spread without check (“let it rip”) through the population. Something the GBD writers never promoted.

One of the GBD authors, Jay Bhattacharya, states “American government officials, working in concert with big tech companies, defamed and suppressed me and my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies—criticism that has been proven prescient. While this may sound like a conspiracy theory, it is a documented fact, and one recently confirmed by a federal circuit court.”

Let’s not forget that these compromised people at the National Institutes of Health, which is the umbrella organization for the CDC, FDA, and NIAID, are the ones who review, and often profit from, the drugs and vaccines that they approve. This unhealthy relationship between regulators and Big Pharma has never been on more spectacular display than with the Covid-19 vaccines.

Power of the Purse: NIH Distributes Billions for Research and Studies
by Lori Weintz at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society