Accusers' bad math: NIH researchers didn't pocket $710 million...
ScienceInsider examines a widely repeated false allegation aired this week at Fauci hearing
 At a 3 June hearing, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–GA) grilled former National Institutes of Health infectious disease chief Anthony Fauci about drug royalties he and other agency scientists received.ALLISON BAILEY/NURPHOTO VIA AP
BC manure spreader... Photo via Tilmor Don'tworryaboutit Productions
An already fiery congressional hearing earlier this week on the role Anthony Fauci played in fighting COVID-19 veered unexpectedly into accusations by Republican lawmakers that the retired federal scientist and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “secretly” raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties from drug companies during the pandemic. The easily determined truth, however, is that nearly all of that money went to NIH branches, not to individuals.
In one of many contentious moments at the hearing held by the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–GA) goaded the former longtime chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases with a placard that showed a bombshell headline from a New York Post article. It read: “NIH scientists made $710M in royalties from drug makers — a fact they tried to hide.” Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R–NY) joined Greene in excoriating Fauci about these payments and his own slice of the pie.
In the 2 June opinion piece, Adam Andrzejewski wrote that his government watchdog nonprofit, OpenTheBooks.com, sued NIH to comply with a public records request for information on royalty payments to its scientists. The payments stem from companies licensing their intellectual property, including new vaccines or drugs.
Andrzejewski wrote that in response to the lawsuit, the agency supplied documents that detailed how, between October 2021 and September 2023, $710 million was distributed among NIH’s institutes, centers, and individuals. NIH redacted how much each scientist received. Andrzejewski’s commentary, which asked whether some of the royalties came from COVID-19 vaccines, is more nuanced than its headline, noting the money went “to the agency and its scientists” between late 2021 and 2023. Greene and Malliotakis made no such distinction, repeating the headline’s theme that individual scientists had received windfalls that totaled hundreds of millions of dollars.
Malliotakis asked Fauci how much of the $710 million went into his own pocket. He said he receives about $120 a year from a monoclonal antibody he developed “about 25 years ago that’s used as a diagnostic that has nothing to do with COVID.”
A series of laws passed by Congress starting in the 1980s that aimed to spur innovation and sharing of technology allows federal employees to receive a limited share of the royalties. But NIH scientists can legally only earn up to $150,000 a year in royalties, which Andrzejewski tells ScienceInsider he knew, although it wasn’t disclosed in his article. And the reality that almost all of the $710 million went back to the U.S. government is also easy to verify on a long-standing, public NIH website about royalty distributions from technology transfers.*
The website shows NIH institutes and centers took in $730 million in royalty income between 2021 and 2023, roughly the amount they received during the preceding 8 years. Yet just $25.5 million went to NIH inventors directly during those 2 years, as well another $11.1 million in 2021. “Much of the increase in royalties can be attributed to the licensing of COVID-related technologies,” NIH said in a statement to Science.
In one exchange with Fauci, Malliotakis asked whether he thought that “any of those royalties, this nearly billions [sic] of dollars, should be going back to the American taxpayer, not in the pockets of the scientists?”
In fact, NIH said most of the royalty income that comes to institutes and centers “supports additional research,” noting that U.S. law stipulates how it may be used, including a requirement that money be given to the U.S. Department of the Treasury if the amount exceeds 5% of an agency’s annual budget.
Despite its misleading headline, echoed across conservative media, Andrzejewski’s commentary accurately highlighted that NIH does not publicly reveal how much individual scientists receive in royalties. A law that would mandate NIH disclose those details, the Royalty Transparency Act, introduced by Senator Rand Paul (R–KY), received unanimous bipartisan support in committee in March, but its fate is unclear.
Andrzejewski, a former Republican candidate for governor of Illinois, has prominently supported Paul’s bill. Andrzejewski says OpenTheBooks.com is nonpartisan and strives to “capture and post all disclosed spending at every level of government.” He adds, “It’s no wonder that there’s public confusion regarding this entire stream of payments,” referring to the inaccurate claims made by Greene and Malliotakis during the hearing. “NIH is acting like they have a lot to hide.”
But Andrzejewski’s own comments have confused the issue, too. In a 5 June interview with The National Desk, a conservative TV news program, he stated that his group discovered “a royalty scheme that enriched 2600 NIH scientists to the tune of more than $1 billion over the past 14 years” and that “over the course of just 2 years, nearly $700 million flowed back to 260 of Fauci’s agency’s scientists.”
Andrzejewski pointed out to ScienceInsider that he clarified his own comments at the end of that interview, stressing that “we can only follow the money at the agency level.”
As for the false New York Post headline, Andrzejewski says he had no input and that it was not up to him whether it should be corrected. “The editors at the New York Post can make their own decisions,” he said.
*To see breakdowns of the royalties on the NIH website, click on the graphic’s key to remove individual recipients; NIH IC stands for Institutes/Centers and IIA refers to Inter-Institutional Agreements that share royalties with licensees. |
