RFK Jr. The Defender - May 11, 2022


Pharma Paid $350M to Fauci and NIH with Adam Andrzejewski

Topics
royalty payments NIH
Hosted by
Robert F. Kennedy
Guests
Adam Angiewski Adam Andrzejewski
Mentioned
Anthony Fauci Robert Cliff Lane Roger Marshall Andrew Engelman Francis Collins Christine Grady Bob Dole Andrzejewski Robert... Omicron Forbes
Facebook Lawsuit Rally with Steve Kirsch Russian Vaccines with Riley Waggaman

Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

147.71

Word count

3,262

Sentence count

223

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Robert Kiyosaki talks with Adam Angiewski about his new book, The Real Anthony Fauci, about the National Institutes of Health and the huge amount of money that it receives from third party royalties from pharmaceutical companies and other third party payers. He also talks about his campaign to force the agency to come clean about the payments to over 900 scientists who work for the agency. And he explains why he thinks the money is coming from a kickback scheme, and why the government should be investigating it. Adam also explains why it s so important that the public be kept in the loop on what's going on at the agency and why it needs to be looked at and why they should be held accountable for the money they're receiving from the pharmaceutical companies that they're supposed to be regulating and the companies that are supposed to make the medicines they're developing and the products they're trying to market to the public. Adam's book is out now, and it's available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Kindle, and is available for purchase on Audible starting July 1st, 2019. If you're interested in buying a copy of the book, you can do so here. It's free and will greatly improve your chances of getting a free copy of The Real A.F.O.I. book. or you can get a copy for free by clicking here. Thanks for listening and supporting the show! if you like the show, share it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms! Subscribe to the podcast, and share it with your friends! and become a supporter of the podcast by clicking the link in iTunes and leaving us a rating and review, and we'll send you a review and review it on your podcasting app! you'll get 20% off your favorite podcasting platform, too! Thanks again next week, and remember to leave us a star rating and reviewing the episode on iTunes and other links in the podcast on iTunes! it'll help us spread the word to your friends about the podcast! we'll be looking out there! Timestamps: 5 stars! 5 stars is a big thank you! 6 stars is much appreciated! 7 stars is also a big thanks to you, and I'll be hearing about this episode on the podcast 8 stars is 5 stars, and a review is much more! 9 stars is very helpful, and they'll get a chance to help us out there in the future!

Transcript

Transcripts from "RFK Jr. The Defender" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:00.000 My guest today is Adam Angiewski, and he is the CEO and founder of OpenTheBooks.com.
00:00:09.000 And by the way, my voice, everybody, is really bad today, so bear with me.
00:00:15.000 Before dedicating his life to public service, Adam co-founded Homepage Directories, a $20 million publishing company.
00:00:24.000 He is a senior policy contributor at Forbes.
00:00:29.000 Adam has nearly 17 million page views on his 206 published investigations.
00:00:36.000 Fact-finding Fauci, which is his most recent publication, has led to the cancellation of his column, which was predictable.
00:00:45.000 I could have told you that was going to happen.
00:00:48.000 I wanted to have you on here, Adam, because you succeeded at doing something that I was trying to do while I researched my book, The Real Anthony Fauci, but was not able to do because NIA, and this is to find out how much in royalty payments Tony Fauci is actually getting and what What is the amount of royalty payments that are received by his deputies and by other people within that agency?
00:01:17.000 This is supposed to be a regulatory agency, and it's really almost dumbfounding that the people who are working there are collecting royalties on the products that they're supposed to be regulating.
00:01:33.000 The mercantile interests of those scientists and those public officials ends up wagging the regulatory dog and the mercantile functions at NIH, as we've seen over and over again.
00:01:50.000 Have been utterly subverted by these kind of mercantile ambitions of the people who work there on opportunities.
00:01:58.000 You were able, by litigating against NIH, you were able to get really the first real glimpse of what's happening with these royalty payments from the industry.
00:02:11.000 And it really is.
00:02:13.000 It's striking.
00:02:15.000 I think you found over $350 million in royalty payments to over 900 scientists who work for that agency.
00:02:24.000 So tell us what you found and tell us about the difficulty you've had in kind of dealing, getting NIH to come clean about this kickback scheme.
00:02:34.000 Let me call it that.
00:02:35.000 Is that fair to call it a kickback scheme?
00:02:37.000 Yeah.
00:02:38.000 Sure, I'm not sure what the legal definitions of the kickback scheme is, but it's definitely legalized and it's definitely a flow of payments to the tune.
00:02:47.000 Now we know, finally, and it's breaking on your show here, Robert, I so appreciate the platform.
00:02:51.000 Thank you very much for having me on.
00:02:53.000 Now we know that since fiscal year 2010 through fiscal year 2020 at NIH, there's been 1,675 scientists and we estimate, we can now estimate the payments of third-party royalties back to them at 350 million dollars.
00:03:13.000 So think about this.
00:03:13.000 We know that every single year NIH doles out 32 billion dollars worth of grants and there's 56,000 entities that receive a grant.
00:03:24.000 So tens of billions of dollars of grant making is going one way and now we know That hundreds of millions of dollars worth of third-party royalties are going the other way.
00:03:36.000 So here's the timeline and how we got to this.
00:03:39.000 Just so people know these terms, my third-party royalties, what we're talking about typically is that an NIH scientist will work on a drug and developing a drug and on developing the kind of regulation of that drug.
00:03:55.000 That drug will then be purchased by a pharmaceutical company and marketed.
00:04:00.000 And when they market that drug, the scientist at an NIH who worked on its development is entitled to a patent claim on that drug.
00:04:14.000 That will, as the pharmaceutical company that he's supposed to be regulating, is now paying money back to him for every time it sells a unit of that drug.
00:04:26.000 Exactly.
00:04:26.000 And this is why we call it an unholy alliance.
00:04:29.000 The royalty stream, this private royalty stream from these third-party payers, like you say, think pharmaceutical companies, back to the NIH scientists, this royalty stream has not received sunshine, has not received public oversight since 2005.
00:04:45.000 In 2005, the Associated Press was able to break open that database.
00:04:49.000 And what they found was That 918 scientists received $9 million that year.
00:04:56.000 The average payment per scientist was $9,700.
00:05:01.000 Well, now we know for the first time since 2005 that the stakes are a lot larger.
00:05:07.000 There's up to 1,700 scientists receiving up to $36 million a year, and the average payment per scientist is now $21,500.
00:05:19.000 So the amount of royalties in the aggregate is up four times, from $9 million to $36 million over the course of the last 17 years.
00:05:28.000 Let me ask an intervening question here.
00:05:30.000 NIH was very forthcoming with you in providing this information, right?
00:05:35.000 Yeah.
00:05:36.000 Well, that's a good question.
00:05:38.000 So here's the timeline.
00:05:39.000 Last September, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request with NIH for that royalty database.
00:05:45.000 We had looked for it on their website back in 2005.
00:05:49.000 They said they were going to post it every single year.
00:05:51.000 We couldn't find it, so we filed a FOIA for it.
00:05:54.000 They ignored it.
00:05:55.000 We received no response to our Federal Freedom of Information Act request, so we sued them in federal court at the end of October.
00:06:02.000 On judicially mandated production starting on February 1st, the agency admitted to holding 3,000 pages subject to our request.
00:06:11.000 3,000 pages of line-by-line royalties to scientists, and every single line in that database could be a potential conflict of interest.
00:06:20.000 So on February 1st, each month, they're producing 300 pages.
00:06:25.000 So now we've had four months of production, 1,200 pages, and now we can estimate, based on that production, what we're going to see in the entire file.
00:06:34.000 To date, on those four productions, it covers the fiscal years 2010 through 2014.
00:06:39.000 And there's $134 million worth of third-party royalties paid back to scientists.
00:06:45.000 And so based on that 40% production, we can conservatively estimate that we're going to see $350 million worth of royalties over the 11-year period from fiscal year 2010 through 2020.
00:06:59.000 Let me go back in time a little, because my memory, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, was that this system is the offspring, essentially, of the Bayh-Dole Act.
00:07:11.000 And that act, I think it was in 1980s.
00:07:14.000 Birch Bayh and Bob Dole answered legislation that was intended to allow universities to collect royalties on drugs and other products that they worked on in order to encourage deal flow, in order to incentivize universities to make scientific breakthroughs.
00:07:39.000 And the language of the act was rather ambiguous.
00:07:44.000 It allowed the federal officials at NIH to interpret the act so that government scientists could also collect royalties.
00:07:57.000 And that's my memory of it.
00:07:59.000 If you please correct me if I'm wrong.
00:08:02.000 By the way, I don't think anybody knew they were doing this until around 2002 when an AP reporter broke the story that Tony Fauci was involved in some shady experiments in Africa and Tennessee in which some people, the subjects that died with a very, very dangerous drug called, I think it was, as it turned out, he had a patent interest in that drug.
00:08:30.000 And they were defrauding the subjects of the experiment by the volunteers by not telling them about the dangers of the drugs.
00:08:40.000 So that was an AP story that came out, I think, around 2002 when they launched an investigation.
00:08:46.000 And for the first time, the American people in Congress realized that NIH scientists were actually collecting royalties on the drugs that they approved.
00:08:56.000 So between 1997 and 2004, Dr.
00:09:00.000 Anthony Fauci and his deputy, Clifford Lane, they collected $45,000 worth of royalties on an experimental AIDS discovery.
00:09:09.000 And so what happened with that was the AP was able to determine that the agency itself put $36 million of taxpayer money into the development of it.
00:09:21.000 And then you have the agency head, Anthony Fauci at NIAID, Collecting royalties and his deputy collecting royalties.
00:09:28.000 So this led to immediate conflict of interest questions.
00:09:32.000 Now Fauci's public statements and Clifford Lane's public statements from 2005 on this issue are very clear.
00:09:38.000 They also thought it was a conflict of interest.
00:09:41.000 As a matter of fact, Tony Fauci is on the record saying that he was going to donate his royalties to charity.
00:09:49.000 But at OpenTheBooks.com we have a simple phrase.
00:09:52.000 It's Says who with what proof?
00:09:54.000 The only proof that we would ever have that Tony Fauci is donating his royalties back is if he made his income tax statements available.
00:10:02.000 And of course, he's not going to do that.
00:10:04.000 Yeah, and we don't know.
00:10:06.000 There's a lot of questions, too.
00:10:08.000 When somebody says, well, I'm going to donate that to charity, does that mean they're donating it to their children's school or their children's education?
00:10:16.000 There's a lot of different charities that you could donate things to that actually redound back We're good to go.
00:10:47.000 He controls the ACIP committee at CDC. These are the committees that approve and then essentially mandate the vaccines and drugs.
00:10:57.000 Tony Fauci's investigators populate those committees.
00:11:01.000 He controls those committees.
00:11:03.000 So is he taking drugs that he has a market interest and a patent interest?
00:11:10.000 Running them through the approval process and then enriching himself at the end.
00:11:14.000 And we still do not know the answer to that question.
00:11:18.000 And we still don't know even from our litigation.
00:11:21.000 So although, Robert, we know the top line numbers will end up being around 350 million of these royalties over an 11 year period.
00:11:30.000 We still don't know the amount per scientist because NIH actually redacted the individual payments to scientists, and they also redacted the third-party payer's name.
00:11:44.000 So we know that Tony Fauci, between fiscal year 2010 and 2014, received 23 royalties.
00:11:51.000 We know that Francis Collins, who is the immediate past director of the National Institutes of Health, he received 14 royalty payments.
00:11:59.000 Clifford Lane, Fauci's deputy over at NIAID, he received eight payments, but we still don't know the amounts.
00:12:08.000 Because NIH has redacted the amounts, and we don't know who paid them because they redacted the name of the payer.
00:12:15.000 So this is still an unresolved conflict of interest.
00:12:19.000 Exactly.
00:12:20.000 So with our lawyers at Judicial Watch, we are going to make court filings to try to get those payments unredacted.
00:12:26.000 So look, this is a strategy over at the National Institutes of Health.
00:12:30.000 They've declared war on transparency.
00:12:32.000 They're using taxpayer dollars to try to keep taxpayers in the dark.
00:12:37.000 And here's the strategy.
00:12:39.000 Number one, they defy FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act request.
00:12:43.000 They just ignore them.
00:12:45.000 They force you to sue them.
00:12:46.000 And then it's expensive taxpayer-paid litigation.
00:12:49.000 And it's an unlimited checkbook for them because all of us, Robert...
00:12:54.000 Litigation is very expensive.
00:12:56.000 And then they use that lawsuit, and even on judicially mandated production, they stonewall, they slow walk, and they heavily redact the disclosures to force you into more litigation.
00:13:08.000 Again, they've got a deep pocket as taxpayers.
00:13:11.000 We're funding their side while we try to battle their side.
00:13:16.000 And then what we've seen with Dr.
00:13:17.000 Fauci is he'll just mislead Congress.
00:13:20.000 So, for instance, you know, in the Senate hearings on his finances, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, he referenced Forbes, he cited Forbes, which was my column.
00:13:29.000 Everybody will remember this Senate hearing because Fauci melted down on national television and he ended up on the hot mic calling the senator a moron after being questioned on his finances. 0.95
00:13:40.000 So he misled Congress. 0.93
00:13:41.000 He said his finances were public knowledge.
00:13:43.000 They're not.
00:13:44.000 were suing for a myriad of documents on his finances, including at the time his ethics disclosures.
00:13:51.000 And then what they do with their critics is they go after them.
00:13:55.000 They pressure their employers, and then they try to de-platform them.
00:13:59.000 That's the strategy at NIH, and that's my experience dealing with the National Institutes of Health.
00:14:05.000 I mean, at this point, we've seen that they did the same thing with the Wuhan lab, where they won't even show Congress the emails of their discussions about how they were going to cover up the links to the Wuhan lab and the funding of gain-of-function where they won't even show Congress the emails of their discussions At this point, do you look at NIH and say this is a predatory organization that is no longer promoting public health,
00:14:32.000 but is now promoting the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the technocracy that is ever expanding its power at but is now promoting the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the technocracy that is ever expanding its power Well, Robert, over the course of the last 20 years, the size, scope, and power of government at all levels has grown substantially.
00:14:55.000 And I think NIH is a perfect example of just how out of control it is at the federal level.
00:15:00.000 Each year, NIH doles out $32 billion worth of grant making.
00:15:05.000 We took a look at where that goes.
00:15:07.000 In a recent six-year period, the eight schools of the Ivy League.
00:15:11.000 Now, they've got a $200 billion endowment collectively between the eight schools of the Ivy League, but they received $10 billion in grants from the National Institutes of Health, just the Ivy League alone.
00:15:24.000 The National Institutes of Health have nearly 20,000 employees.
00:15:30.000 Now, why can't, with 20,000 employees that work for NIH, why can't they respond and produce documents subject to the Freedom of Information Act requests?
00:15:41.000 And it's by design, they don't want to.
00:15:44.000 And let's put this in perspective.
00:15:46.000 NIH employs 86 public affairs officers for an annual payroll, including benefits, of $15 million a year.
00:15:54.000 They have understaffed their FOIA production department.
00:15:58.000 For instance, during discovery on our federal lawsuit, we learned that they're behind on 633 FOIA requests.
00:16:06.000 They're past due on that.
00:16:07.000 They're being sued in addition to the two lawsuits we have against them.
00:16:10.000 They're being sued 33 times.
00:16:13.000 They're defying FOIA. They've got 20,000 employees, but they're fully staffed in PR. What did you learn from the documents describing Tony Fauci's finances that you were able to uncover?
00:16:28.000 So here's what we found.
00:16:29.000 Here's what the record shows.
00:16:31.000 Number one, we found that Dr.
00:16:33.000 Anthony Fauci is the number one most highly compensated federal employee.
00:16:38.000 He out-earns the president, four-star generals in the United States military.
00:16:42.000 He out-earns every single one of the 4.3 million bureaucrats at the federal level.
00:16:48.000 He made $456,000 last year.
00:16:51.000 Here's the second thing we found.
00:16:53.000 We found that Mrs.
00:16:55.000 Fauci, Christine Grady, out-earns the Vice President of the United States. 0.97
00:16:59.000 The third thing we found is that when Tony Fauci retires...
00:17:03.000 She works for NIH. She is the Chief Ethics Officer at NIH, which is an irony.
00:17:09.000 Let me just put it that way.
00:17:11.000 And I take it a step further.
00:17:14.000 The two Fauci's live a conflict of interest around the bioethics table, both at the breakfast table at home, at the office, and then at the dinner table back at home every single day.
00:17:25.000 For instance, in the Vanity Fair piece at the peak of the pandemic in July of 2020, Mrs.
00:17:30.000 Fauci admitted...
00:17:32.000 That she heads up the bioethics office.
00:17:34.000 They've got 30 bioethics researchers underneath her. 1.00
00:17:38.000 She was researching millions of angles related to the public policy response of COVID-19, including mandatory masking, vaccines, therapeutics like rendezivir, and all these other things.
00:17:50.000 She said millions of angles.
00:17:52.000 So on one hand, you've got Mrs. 1.00
00:17:54.000 Fauci doing the ethics reporting.
00:17:57.000 And on the other hand, you've got her husband putting together the public health response to COVID-19.
00:18:04.000 This needs to be a congressional investigation.
00:18:06.000 If we could get, and we're suing for it, Dr.
00:18:09.000 Anthony Fauci's contract, I think what we would find is that it has more waivers than when the Rolling Stones played Madison Square Garden.
00:18:17.000 And they better have a waiver for nepotism between him and his wife. 0.99
00:18:21.000 What do we know about his finances at this point?
00:18:25.000 Well, Dr.
00:18:26.000 Anthony Fauci, so in the Senate hearing, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall was able to get unredacted copies for the first time.
00:18:34.000 No one had seen these.
00:18:35.000 We were suing for this.
00:18:37.000 The 2019 and 2020 ethics disclosure and public financial reporting documents.
00:18:42.000 And as soon as they were disclosed, within 24 hours, I wrote my last column at Forbes.
00:18:48.000 And here was the top line.
00:18:49.000 The two Fauci's in 2020 during the pandemic year made $1.7 million between their public salaries and benefits, royalties, travel perks, and other benefits, and their investment gains.
00:19:03.000 They made $1.7 million in 2020.
00:19:06.000 They had a combined net worth rivaling $11 million.
00:19:10.000 And I think it's the old story.
00:19:12.000 You go to Washington, D.C. to do good, and you end up doing pretty well.
00:19:15.000 So what happened to you at Forbes?
00:19:18.000 Did you actually get fired at Forbes?
00:19:20.000 Well, I learned just how sensitive the Fauci financials are.
00:19:25.000 On a Sunday morning, six of the top people over at NIH... So it was two directors, two bureau chiefs, two of their top PR people.
00:19:33.000 They took time out from defending in January when Omicron was sweeping the country.
00:19:38.000 They took time out on a Sunday morning from defending the country against the pandemic to write a letter to Forbes, a media institution that's been around for 100 years.
00:19:47.000 They couched it as a corrections email.
00:19:50.000 But there were no substantial corrections.
00:19:53.000 It was basically a letter to say, put Andrzejewski on the bad list.
00:19:57.000 Forbes got the message quickly.
00:19:59.000 It's the last column I ever wrote.
00:20:01.000 NIH came down hard on Forbes. 0.97
00:20:03.000 Forbes came down hard on me.
00:20:05.000 And 10 days later, my column was canceled.
00:20:07.000 What's your attitude towards Forbes at this point?
00:20:11.000 You know, I've been there for about eight years, 206 pieces.
00:20:15.000 It was a good relationship.
00:20:16.000 But look, things changed when I wrote about Anthony Fauci.
00:20:20.000 So in January of 2021, when we found that he was the most highly compensated federal employee, things changed.
00:20:28.000 That column at Forbes has over 900,000 views.
00:20:31.000 But I don't think Forbes was happy about it.
00:20:33.000 In 2020, I put up 36 pieces.
00:20:36.000 26 of those were specially designated for promotion at Forbes called an editor's pick.
00:20:42.000 The first piece I put up in 2021 was on Fauci.
00:20:46.000 I put up 56 more reports, zero.
00:20:49.000 Zero times were my pieces ever, ever picked as an editor's pick going forward.
00:20:54.000 On the day my column was canceled, Forbes editors picked a column that Fauci's portrait will hang in the Smithsonian, and that was designated an editor's pick.
00:21:06.000 They kissed the ring, Robert.
00:21:09.000 Did you have a relationship with your editor there?
00:21:12.000 So I would really, I wouldn't hear from my editors for months and months at a time.
00:21:17.000 But my direct editor, yes, I had a good relationship with him for basically eight years.
00:21:23.000 And is there any embarrassment on his part about what happened to him?
00:21:28.000 So my rank-and-file direct report editor, I left him, when I put up my story about how fact-finding Fauci led to my cancellation at Forbes, I redacted his name because he wasn't at the executive level.
00:21:40.000 I only left the Forbes executive names in there, and I always had a good relationship with my direct report editor.
00:21:46.000 Andrew Angiewski, thank you very much for your inquisitive mind, for your courage, and for finally getting at the answer to some of these questions.
00:21:56.000 I hope you'll come back on the show and talk to us when you finally find out exactly how much he's making.
00:22:03.000 We're going to shake it like a rat terrier, Robert.