While NIH remains a massive funding source for PIs, rich contracts from big drug companies and royalty payments from drug products often dwarf their government funding. Pharma money is the PIs’ bread and butter, commanding their loyalties and dictating their priorities. They and their clinics and research institutions are, effectively, arms of the pharmaceutical industry. Their empires rely on Pharma for their growth and survival.
Moreover, PIs typically function in quasi-feudal fiefdoms: loyal to a single pharmaceutical company. Each drug company—Glaxo, Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson, and Gilead—cultivates a cadre of its own reliable PIs whom it funds to conduct clinical trials and drug research. Unwritten protocols dictate that a Merck PI will not customarily perform research for a Merck competitor. Typically, the drug company contracts with the reliable PI’s medical school, attending hospital, or research institution to run clinical trials. The company makes payments ranging from a few hundred dollars to $10,000 (depending on the trial phase, complexity, and the company) for each patient enrolled in the drug trial,117 with the university skimming one-half to two-thirds of those funds for “academic overhead.”118 Those payments from the pharmaceutical company secure long-term loyalty from the institution and its board. Moreover, both the researcher and the university customarily share patent interests in any product the PI helps develop, collecting rich royalties when it hits the market. Additional money from the Pharma sponsor supports the PI’s assistants and laboratory costs. The drug company also pays “legalized bribes” to the PI grantee through honoraria, expert witness fees, speaking gigs, and first-class travel to exclusive resorts for conferences. All these perquisites tend to fortify loyalty and incentivize the favorable research results necessary to securing FDA drug approvals. On all sides of these transactions, each stakeholder understands that positive reviews of the subject drug promise future work.
According to Nussbaum, “PIs do their own kind of science and, more often than not, their experiments have little to do with either health or the public. They test drugs by private pharmaceutical companies for personal gain, for money that goes to their universities, and for power.”119
The system allows pharmaceutical companies to systematically divert federal monies—the initial NIAID grant—to serve their own private profit priorities. Naturally, the system is hostile to drugs with expired patents or those that emerge from companies that are not paying the PI’s research expenses. This bias explains Dr. Fauci’s signature animosity toward non-pharmaceutical, unpatentable, or patent-expired and generic remedies.
In his unpublished history of the HIV era, Down the Rabbit Hole, author and historian Terry Michael offers a similar description of Dr. Fauci’s abrogation of his scientific role to the army of Pharma PIs: “But NIH has other clients, including thousands of grant-seeking medical science Ph.D.’s produced by American universities after World War II. NIAID funds much of the pharmaceutical industry’s research and clinical trials. In fact, Big Pharma has become a client of the NIH and especially its NIAID.”120
This powerful army, garrisoned at hospitals and universities in every large American community, allows Pharma and Dr. Fauci to control the public health narrative around the country. Before I understood its structure, I encountered the pervasive power of the combination.
Between 1990 and 2020, I served as president of an influential environmental group, Waterkeepers, with 350 affiliates around the county and the globe. Waterkeepers is the world’s largest water protection group. I published regularly in the New York Times and all the major papers: Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and San Francisco Chronicle; in magazines including Esquire, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic; and in online publications, most often in HuffPost. I delivered over 220 speeches each year, including sixty paid speaking engagements to large audiences at universities and corporate events. I earned a substantial income from those appearances. All that changed in 2005, after I published an article, “Deadly Immunity,” about corruption in CDC’s vaccine branch, simultaneously in Rolling Stone and Salon.
Newspapers thereafter generally refused to publish my articles on vaccine safety and ultimately banned me from publishing on any issues. In 2008, without consulting me or citing a specific reason, Salon retracted and removed my 2005 article. Salon’s founder, David Talbot, faulted Salon for caving in to Pharma. Rolling Stone finally removed the article without explanation in February 2021, and HuffPost purged all half-dozen of my vaccine articles. The editors of those online journals had thoroughly factchecked my pieces prior to publication. They removed them without notice to me, and without ever explaining their decisions. It was the beginning of the mass censorship of any vaccine information that departs from official narratives. That year, universities and corporate hosts and municipal speakers’ forums suddenly cancelled my scheduled speeches in droves. My bookings dropped from sixty paid speeches per year down to one or two. My speakers’ bureau told me that floods of telephone calls from powerful members of the medical community had prompted the cancellations. They deluged the offices of presidents and board members of the colleges, businesses, and community groups that were hosting me, protesting my appearances. The callers were public health officials and leading doctors from local hospitals, university medical schools, and influential research centers in those locales. Using similar language, they offered dire warnings that I was anti-vaccine, anti-science, a “baby killer,” and that my appearance would jeopardize public health and vital funding to university medical school programs.
The threat to interrupt money flows to the university PIs invariably trumps the traditions of speech freedom revered—in theory—by university administrators. Starting in 2019, PIs at NYU attempted to force the ouster of popular historian and propaganda expert Professor Mark Crispin Miller from its faculty roster and law professor Mary Holland from its law school faculty because they dared question reigning vaccine orthodoxies.
Terry Michaels summarized how Dr. Fauci exploited the strategic landscapes of the HIV pandemic to launch his career on a trajectory toward the unimaginable power that would allow him to dictate official orthodoxies, control the press, set international health policies, and even to shut down the global economy: “Dr. Anthony Fauci seized an opportunity to create a multi-billion dollar bureaucracy, distributing thousands of grants to seekers of federally funded research largesse, with a disproportionate (to other diseases) number going to HIV-AIDS researchers.”121
Tony Fauci did not create the PI system, but his inexperience both as a scientist and as an administrator meant that he relied upon it and was, at first, at its mercy. Later, he took command of those troops and organized them into a powerful juggernaut that journalist John Lauritsen calls “the Medical Industrial Complex.”122