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The entire public health system is a “target-rich environment for waste, fraud, corruption and taxpayer abuse,” Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.com, said during an interview with comedian and political commentator Russell Brand.
Andrzejewski founded the government spending watchdog organization when, after he wrote an investigative piece on Dr. Anthony Fauci, Forbes terminated the column he wrote for eight years.
Last year, Open The Books filed 50,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
According to Andrzejewski, those FOIA requests revealed, among other things, that “NIH, the National Institutes of Health, is actually a revolving door.”
Each year the NIH awards about $32 billion in grants to 54,000 healthcare entities — including pharmaceutical companies, universities and research organizations.
Open The Books found that over the past 12 years, $1.4 billion worth of those grants went back to NIH leadership and 2,400 NIH scientists in secret “third-party royalties” — royalties paid by pharmaceutical companies back to the NIH or its scientists who are credited as co-inventors of pharmaceutical products.
Brand commented on the findings:
“When there are so many financial incentives, it’s difficult to maintain the idea that these organizations are in any way objective … when that is coupled with the consequences that you suffered for your free columns, it seems like information is being controlled.
“It appears … that people are being financially rewarded. It starts to sound very much like corruption.”
Andrzejewski explained that the NIH is suing Moderna for leaving three NIH scientists off of its patent application. Even with those omissions, third-party royalties to the NIH doubled to $127 million in 2021, from the Pfizer vaccine.
The information available to the public, even through FOIA requests, is limited because the documents come heavily redacted, according to Andrzejewski. That makes the relationships hard to trace.
“Incredibly, although NIH produced 3,000 pages of information, they redacted key information that we need to follow the money,” he said.
Key redacted information included the name of the third-party payer, or pharmaceutical companies, making payments; the names of the 2,400 scientists and top leadership, including Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, former NIH director, who received payments; and the inventions, license numbers and patent numbers.
“I mean it’s redacted so much that if we didn’t employ forensic data scientists these disclosures would have been absolutely worthless,” Andrzejewski said.
Open The Books in May 2022 released a report on the payments. Congressional hearings followed immediately, during which Lawrence Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D., acting director of the NIH, “admitted that, yes, every single one of those 56,000 payments over the course of the last 12 years has the appearance of a conflict of interest,” according to Andrzejewski.
“I could see why they have to tightly control the narrative when so much of the information that’s revealed through your intrepid research and tenacity is so detrimental to the version of reality that they would have us believe,” Brand said.
Brand asked Andrzejewski to comment on other aspects of the work at Open The Books.
Andrzejewski explained that of the $800 billion authorized for unemployment aid as part of the COVID-19 stimulus packages, up to $400 billion “was stolen by criminals, con artists and crime syndicates from around the world,” in what he called, “the largest public fraud in the history of the country.”
Open The Books also investigated U.S. taxpayer-funded research that some may find wasteful, including a $1 million grant to NASA to “prepare the nation’s religions for the discovery of extraterrestrial life.”
Watch the segment here:
