Madison Area Lyme Support Group

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With 27 different institutes and centers housed under the National Institutes of Health (NIH) umbrella — including the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)  — NIH is the largest biomedical research agency in the world.

Operating under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH currently wields a hefty annual budget of nearly $42 billion.

Within NIH, the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) plays a “strategic role” in supporting patenting and licensing for inventions that emerge from laboratories at the NIH and also Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In a win-win business model, the NIH routinely grants technology licenses (both exclusive and non-exclusive) to the private sector for use or commercialization of its inventions, with those licenses then driving billions of dollars in royalties back into NIH coffers.

In fiscal year (FY) 2020 alone — October 2019 through September 2020 — aggregated data for NIH and CDC show the agencies collected a neat $63.4 million in royalty revenues.  (See link for article)

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**Comment**

There is no way on earth public health ‘authorities’ can make unbiased decisions with this kind of money changing hands.

• The article points out that Universities also receive royalties (disingenuously classified as “federal compensation” rather than “outside income”) when they market patented technologies, yet taxpayers continue paying universities for research.
• Many NIH scientists routinely fail to disclose royalty payments – one of whom is Fauci, the highest paid federal employee.
• Evidently the NIH doesn’t report which patents are licensed or release data that would help the public evaluate how licensing affects access to resulting drugs.
• Public information was lacking in the OTT’s FY2020 annual report, yet had $63.4 million in FY2020 royalty revenues, with a significant 20% uptick in invention disclosures (invention disclosures are the first step in the patenting process) and 47% more patent applications compared to the previous year. NIH executed more licenses in FY2020 (n=359) than in any prior fiscal year dating back to 1985.
• CDC’s webpage listing technologies available for licensing (and, therefore, with the potential to generate royalties) has not been updated since May, 2020, when it had about 60 technologies, many related to diagnostics or vaccine development.  There will be considerably more once it’s updated.
• 66% of CDC grant funds in 2020 were COVID-related.
• The Biden administration has requested a 21% NIH budget increase – to $51 billion.
• Most frightening of all is the creation of a new NIH which will merge national security with health security modeled after DARPA.  (Hopefully you can see where this is going, if not, read this).

Please look at the shark feeding frenzy resulting from NIAID-developed SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins and plasmids (molecules encoding the spike proteins) to spur development of COVID-19 diagnostics, treatments and vaccines:

• Ninety-six agreements with 75 academic organizations, nonprofit entities, government agencies, international organizations and other entities to furnish NIAID spike proteins or plasmids for research projects (called “material transfer agreements”)

• Twenty-one licenses negotiated with biotechnology or pharmaceutical companies, mostly for SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development — these licenses pertain to “most of the vaccines in advanced clinical trials and several currently in use around the world” (notably, the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine that received Emergency Use Authorization in Dec. 2020)

• An additional 16 agreements to collaborate on research, including four clinical trial agreements for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines  Source

It appears that COVID is good for government business, but not so good for public health.

The article finishes by pointing out the irony that the highly censored COVID treatments, which are cheap, safe, and effective are not what “royalty-hungry” scientists are interested in.  In the words of Columbia University’s Dr. Ian Lipkin, they prefer novel treatments that are “sexy and new and patentable.”

These treatments also don’t further the global control agenda behind the NIH’s new DARPA-like agency.