Anthony Fauci is effectively King of the National Institute of Health. He gets paid $450,000 a year — the highest paid public servant in the United States. In just one year alone the NIH dished out $30 billion to more than 50,000 recipients. And there are royalty payments that flow back the other way, which amounted to $350 million dollars over the decade from 2010-2020. And here's the weird thing, most of those royalty payments are secret.

Thirty billion dollars is an awfully big carrot, and even though $350 million seems small in comparison, it's awfully big compared to the salaries of the few key decision-makers. It's an obvious conflict of interest, and lives are at risk, but it's not even being disclosed.

If Big Pharma were paying off people to get their drugs approved, it would look a lot like this. And if Big Pharma (or the asset managers that own big pharma) were also paying off the media to silence reporting of NIH corruption would the media ignore this story — exactly like it does?

In a normal world this type of corruption would be front page news. There is no reason royalty payments should be secret.

Tim Brown, The WashingtonStandard*