Massive Conflicts of Interest at the NIH
STORY-AT-A-GLANCE
- One of the primary vehicles for kickbacks and fraud seems to be foundations associated with federal agencies. The reason they’re so frequently used for questionable transactions is because foundations are private entities and not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests and other open records laws
- The board of directors of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) is heavily populated with Big Pharma players. This raises serious questions about conflicts of interest, as the foundation oversees the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars — unregulated funds that typically go right back into the coffers of the drug industry
- This conflict of interest also, at least in part, helps explain the actions of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and now-retired director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins. Both have gone out of their way to protect the makers of COVID shots and dismiss evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was created in and escaped from a lab
- Dr. Julie Gerberding became the FNIH CEO March 1, 2022. She was formerly director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After leaving the CDC, she became the executive vice president of strategic communications at Merck
- The FNIH’s board of directors includes seven current or former drug company executives, the FDA, the Sackler family (notorious for its creation of a deadly opioid epidemic), Johns Hopkins (co-sponsor of Event 201, which “predicted” COVID-19 and the subsequent destruction of human rights), and two major investment bankers, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock
One of the primary vehicles for kickbacks and fraud seems to be foundations associated with federal agencies. This article will highlight and expose yet another way we are being conned and manipulated by examining the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health1 (FNIH), whose board is plastered with major Big Pharma players.
This raises serious questions about conflicts of interest, seeing how the foundation oversees the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars — unregulated funds that typically go right back into the coffers of the drug industry. It’s a very clever strategy to extract even more funds from the American taxpayers.
This conflict of interest also, at least in part, helps explain the actions of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and now-retired director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins.2 Both have gone out of their way to protect the makers of COVID shots and dismiss evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was created in and escaped from a lab.
FNIH Board — A Who’s Who of Big Pharma
In 2020, Fauci received the FNIH’s Charles A. Sanders MD Partnership Award for his leadership and support of “FNIH programs propelling research in lethal infectious diseases.”3
Dr. Charles Sanders was the FNIH chairman between 1996 and 2016. Before that, he was the chairman and CEO of Glaxo Inc. He also spent eight years with Squibb Corp., where he held several positions, including CEO of the Science and Technology Group.4 He’s currently a member of the FNIH board of directors.
In the video above, Fauci is interviewed by Dr. Freda Lewis-Hall about his career, his achievements and the public-private partnerships that allowed for the creation of Operation Warp Speed and the rapid deployment of a COVID-19 jab. Lewis-Hall is a former chief medical officer and executive vice president at Pfizer. She is also a current board member of the FNIH.
Another striking member of the FNIH’s board is Dr. Julie Gerberding. If you have a sharp memory for details, you may recall she served as director of the CDC from 2002 to 2009.
After resigning from the CDC, she entered the express revolving door between industry and government and was hired by Merck as their vice president in charge of vaccines. Imagine that — the head of the government agency responsible for policing vaccines is hired by one of the world’s largest producers of vaccines.
Sadly, it’s all perfectly legal. Later, she oversaw global public policy and strategic communications at Merck, followed by a position as chief patient officer and executive vice president for population health and sustainability.5 Gerberding has now taken her nefarious behavior to an entirely new level. She’s slid back through yet another revolving door and is the CEO of FNIH as of March 1, 2022.6 Other FNIH board members include:
| Chairman Dr. Steven Paul, CEO and chairman of Karuna Therapeutics |
| Marijn Dekkers, Ph.D., chairman of Novalis LifeSciences |
| Paul Herrling, Ph.D., chairman for the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases |
| Dr. Paul Stoffels, vice chairman of the executive committee and chief scientific officer for Johnson & Johnson |
| Jillian Sackler, president and CEO of the Dame Jillian and Dr. Arthur M. Sackler Foundation for the Arts, Sciences and Humanities |
| Dr. Elias Zerhouni, Professor Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University |
| James Donovan, a Goldman Sachs partner |
| Russel Steenberg, managing director and global head of BlackRock Private Equity Partners |
The two non-voting directors are Collins and Dr. Stephen Hahn, the current commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. This is quite the list.
We’ve got seven current or former drug company executives, the CDC, the FDA, the Sackler family (notorious for its creation of a deadly opioid epidemic), Johns Hopkins (co-sponsor of Event 201, which “predicted” COVID-19 and the subsequent destruction of human rights), and two major investment bankers, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock.
The inclusion of BlackRock is particularly interesting, and disturbing, considering they have a hidden monopoly on global asset holdings. Together with Vanguard,BlackRock has ownership in some 1,600 American firms, which in 2015 had combined revenues of $9.1 trillion. If you add in the third-largest global asset holder, State Street, their combined ownership encompasses nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.7 Just what is BlackRock doing on the FNIH’s board of directors?
Who Funds the FNIH?
Then there are the donors. The largest donor to the FNIH is none other than Bill Gates. According to the FNIH’s 2020 statutory report,8 The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $96,981,262 that year, accounting for 15% of the Foundation’s annual revenue.9
In 2019, the Gates Foundation’s contribution of $49,827,480 accounted for 35% of the annual revenue.10,11,12 As the top donor, it’s not farfetched to assume Gates might have significant leverage over the direction of the foundation and its funds. GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Wellcome also donated between $5 million and $10 million each in 2020.13 FNIH programs funded by the Gates Foundation include but are not limited to:
- Combining Epitope Based Vaccine Design with Informatics-Based Evaluation
- Comprehensive Cellular Vaccine Immune Monitoring Consortium
- Global collaborative for Coordination of Gene Drive Research and Development
- The Partnership to Accelerate Novel TB Regimens
- mRNA encoded HIV Env-Gag Virus-like-particle Vaccines
The last program on the list — the creation of novel mRNA-based HIV vaccines — is described14 as a project to “test a new HIV vaccine concept in animals using noninfectious ‘virus-like particles’ encoded by an RNA vaccine with the goal of inducing protective antibody responses.”
The initial request for collaboration came from the NIAID at the end of July 2020. In August 2020, the FNIH Portfolio Oversight Committee approved the project, “contingent upon a commitment of full funding in the amount of $1.45 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”
The Gates Foundation fulfilled that commitment in October 2020. A memorandum of understanding between the FNIH and the NIAID was finalized in early 2021. A sub-award was granted to the University of Montreal (CHUM), and Bioqual was given a service agreement to manage the clinical trial.
Bill Gates also contributes to the FNIH through Gates Ventures,15 a rapidly growing venture capital and investment firm that works side by side with the Gates Foundation’s program teams “to identify investment opportunities.”16 Specifically, Gates Ventures is an organizational donor to the FNIH’s Biomarkers Consortium (BC), a cancer steering committee, alongside a long list of drug companies.
Congress Seeks Greater Transparency
As mentioned earlier, all of this can help explain Fauci’s and Collins’ behavior during the COVID pandemic. Collins is a board member, Fauci got the foundation’s top reward for support in 2020, and money flows into the foundation from drug companies and Gates, all of whom have vested interests in making sure that whatever the NIH does and recommends to the public, it will produce profits for them.
According to its 2020 Statutory Report,17 the FNIH has raised more than $1.2 billion, and as mentioned earlier, most of that money goes right back to the drug industry, without Congressional appropriation or oversight. While the whole thing reeks of conflicts of interest, it may be difficult to get to the bottom of because, as a 501c3, the FNIH is cleverly exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Nonprofits are considered private entities, and therefore not subject to FOIA and other open records laws.18,19 However, the NIH is subject to FOIA since it’s a government agency, and the funds raised go to the NIH. Basically, it’s a system set up to bypass oversight, and the U.S. Congress is responsible for creating this fraud-fraught system.
Congress Created This Fraud-Fraught System
Congress is responsible for the oversight of federal agencies, but in the early 1990s, it created what sure looks like a pay-to-play system. Not only did Congress create the FNIH, they also set up the CDC Foundation,20 which funnels millions of dollars from drug companies and vaccine makers into the CDC.21
This explains the CDC’s highly irrational and harmful COVID recommendations. The fact that the CDC lies about its pharma funding only makes it all the more suspicious. The CDC has long fostered the perception of independence by stating it does not accept funding from special interests.
In disclaimers peppered throughout the CDC’s website22 and in its publications, it says the agency “does not accept commercial support” and has “no financial interests or other relationships with the manufacturers of commercial products.” With the information exposed in this article it is obvious that this is a cleverly obfuscated pack of lies — all possible through sheer semantics, as the funds are diverted through the foundation rather than going straight to the CDC.
In 2019, several watchdog groups — including the U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), Public Citizen, Knowledge Ecology International, Liberty Coalition and the Project on Government Oversight — petitioned23 the CDC to stop making these false disclaimers24 because, in reality, the CDC receives millions of dollars each year from commercial interests through its government-chartered foundation, the CDC Foundation, which funnels those contributions to the CDC after deducting a fee.25
On the CDC Foundation’s website, you’ll find a long list26 of “corporate partners” that have provided the CDC with funding over the years. The CDC even accepts money earmarked for specific studies or programs aimed at expanding corporate profits or reducing drug companies’ liability exposure.27
As just one example, in 2018, Collins ended up canceling a $100 million study to assess the effects of moderate alcohol consumption after it was discovered that the NIH had inappropriately solicited money for the study directly from the spirits industry, and had designed the study “to satisfy industry interests.”28 Collins also had to ditch a $400 million study into opioid dependency after an independent panel warned there were potential conflicts of interest.29
In 2018, a congressional spending panel also warned the FNIH and the CDC Foundation that their disclosures of financial donations were inadequate. As reported by Science at the end of June 2018:30
“Congress created the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) and the CDC Foundation … to raise private funds to support federal biomedical and health research.
It hoped to encourage transparency and prevent potential conflicts of interest by specifying in the law that the foundations had to report ‘the source and amount of all gifts’ they receive, as well as any restrictions on how the donations could be used.
But last week, legislators on the House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee that oversees NIH and CDC expressed concern that the foundations may not be following those disclosure rules …
A report accompanying a 2019 spending bill moving through Congress reminds the foundations to abide by the PHSA when writing their annual reports … The lawmakers also say it’s not OK to hide the identity of donors who have attached strings to their gift by labeling them as ‘anonymous.’
The language ‘is a marker that we want more transparency,’ says one House appropriations staffer, speaking on background because of committee rules on who can speak to the press. ‘We’d like to see [the foundations] go further, and this language is meant to start a conversation.’”
Among “anonymous” donors to the FNIH in 2016 were the Gates Foundation, despite having given a sizeable $19.1 million grant.31 While the financial statements of these foundations may have improved since 2018, the system itself, which gives private industry the power to influence regulatory agencies through unregulated funding, remains unchanged.
Globalists Aim to Take Over Health Systems Worldwide
The reason for having a BlackRock representative on the FNIH’s board of directors could potentially have something to do with the globalists’ plan to monopolize health systems worldwide — a plan that is taking shape as we speak.
In June 2021, Gerberding, now head of the FNIH, wrote a Time article32 laying out the framework for an international pandemic-surveillance network, which would include threat prediction and preemption as well. While Gerberding did not name the World Health Organization, we now know that’s the organization designated as the top-down ruler, not only of all things related to pandemics but also health in general. I’ll have an entire article detailing this in tomorrow’s newsletter.
It’s important to realize that unless we can somehow prevent the WHO from acquiring this power, it will be able to dictate things like mandatory vaccinations and health passports moving forward, and its dictates would supersede all national and state laws. We simply cannot let this happen.
At the same time, we need to realize just how bought and paid for our U.S. regulatory agencies are, and figure out a way to clean up that mess. There’s been a revolving door between government and private industry for decades, which is how we got here in the first place. Closing that door might be a first step in the right direction, but it’s not going to be enough by itself.
The NIH, CDC and the Food and Drug Administration are all so thoroughly infiltrated by industry, restoring them to their intended functions is no easy task. Disturbingly, the same technocratic powers that are working to give the WHO global power over global health have also infiltrated these U.S. agencies. As a result, they’re unlikely to push back. They’re going to be more than willing to take orders from the WHO.