Scientists who advised government during Covid did not reveal they had received more than £200m in grants from one of the world's biggest pharma investors
Scientific advisors to the Government during the Covid pandemic failed to reveal they received over £200million in grants from one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical investors, a report reveals.
Twenty-six members of the influential Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), which helped shape lockdown rules, did not register the research funding from the Wellcome Trust in an apparent conflict of interest.
The report by the campaign group UsForThem analysed research data from The Wellcome Trust, which is largely funded by its investment portfolio and links to the pharmaceutical industry.
It claims the 26 members received at least £210 million in grants from Wellcome between 2018 and 2026 which were not declared on the SAGE register of participants' interests (Ropi) with £175 million provided during the key Covid years of 2020 and 2021 alone.
Analysis by the Mail on Sunday of publicly-available information shows one grant recipient was Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the biggest advocates for vaccines and whose advice to Prime Minister Boris Johnson led to the UK lockdown in March 2020, and who famously resigned as a government adviser two months later after it emerged he broke rules to meet his married lover.
Prof Ferguson declared in the register that he was involved with a 'Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium', but did not mention Wellcome anywhere. Yet he was either the lead applicant or sponsored other applications for grants worth £5.6million including a £1.25 million grant looking at influenza-like viruses in Vietnam, according to the analysis of Wellcome's figures.
Of the 149 SAGE members during the Covid crisis 38 applied for funding or supported other applications to the Wellcome Trust, the UK's biggest charity. Of the 38, just 12 declared their relationship - leaving 26 who failed to do so.
The SAGE register of participants' interests is publicly available as is Wellcome Trust data on projects it has helped to fund, giving full visibility on which SAGE members have complied with the rules.
Ben Kingsley, UsForThem's legal director, said: 'SAGE members were told very clearly to disclose their research funding relationships precisely because they were in a position to influence public health decisions that affected millions of people during a national emergency. The fact that some members appear not to have respected those requirements raises serious questions about transparency and potential conflicts of interest.
'If the Government wants to maintain the public's trust, then we have to be sure that the advice given by its most senior advisers is free from risks of bias or conflicts, and this means those advisers need to be completely transparent with the public about their relationships with private organisations such as the Wellcome Trust.
'A good number of the members of SAGE grasped that fundamental point very clearly but our research shows others didn't, and one has to ask: 'Why?'
SAGE's register states participants must highlight any commercial interests, research interests, and whether any funding has been secured in the past or currently.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, who was a SAGE member during Covid and also headed Wellcome during the pandemic before standing down in 2023, controversially discredited the Wuhan lab-leak theory which is claimed to have kickstarted the global crisis at the end of 2019
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