Two Chinese vaccine manufacturers were among the most frequent payers of royalties to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former agency during the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, documents obtained by Open The Books show.
Researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Fauci once headed, collected $690 million in royalty payments for the licensing of intellectual property created in taxpayer-funded federal labs between the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, according to records obtained by Open The Books. The Chinese-owned Changchun BCHT and China National Biotec Group made 87 and 52 royalty disbursements to NIAID scientists during that period, respectively.
The NIAID declined to provide Open The Books with a breakdown of how much third parties, including those based in China, paid to the agency.
Changchun BCHT made the fifth most payments while China National Biotec Group made the eleventh most during the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, according to Open The Books. Other firms that paid out royalties during the period included large pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Moderna, Merck & Co. and GSK.
China National Biotec Group is a subsidiary of China’s state-owned pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm.
“China has demonstrated shortcomings both in ethics and safety when it comes to their medical research,” Open The Books founder Adam Andrzejewski told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “At least one part of the government understood the ethical concerns, and another still allowed risky gain-of-function research.”
“These conflicting decisions beg even more scrutiny when we understand that Chinese entities also license our medical innovations, sending that cash back to NIH and its scientists. Taxpayers must be allowed to follow the money and untangle this web of conflicting interests,” Andrzejewski said.
Fauci ran NIAID until the end of 2022.
During the 2022 fiscal year, third parties paid $350 million to the NIAID, which is over ten times the amount the agency took in during the past ten years combined, documents obtained by Open The Books show. China National Biotec Group and Changchun BCHT each made 26 payments to NIAID scientists in the 2022 fiscal year.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have both acknowledged that COVID-19 likely emerged from a Chinese lab.
NIAID did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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