It's All About Wealth, Not Public Health

U.S. public health agency officials, from the top down, stopped working for the American people since at least the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and began lining their own pockets.

Why are we still employing them, and why aren’t they in prison, or at least under indictment?

Last week Rep. Chip Roy sent a letter to the acting director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), demanding answers about payments employees received from foreign entities, including some connected to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The Texas Republican, along with 14 other House Republicans who signed the letter, sounded the alarm after Open The Books, a government watchdog group, reported that agency employees accepted $325 million in payments from 31 private companies worldwide.

"These payments raise not only national security concerns but deepen concerns regarding the potential undue influence massive healthcare companies may have over public health agencies engaged in developing and regulating products and responding to public health threats — like COVID-19," the Republicans’ letter said.

"Of particular concern, companies that were intimately involved with — and stood to financially gain from — the federal government’s COVID-19 response, such as Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech US, and Johnson & Johnson, provided a number of payments to NIH scientists.”

The people who received funds included then-NIH Director Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, who was then the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease (NIAID). The public health chiefs received a combined 58 royalty payments.

“It should also be noted that Dr. Fauci, despite being the highest-paid employee in the federal government, hauled in at least 37 third-party payments from companies, while Dr. Collins received at least 21 third-party payments,” the letter said.

"Naturally, providing payments to NIH scientists, even if the product was unrelated to COVID-19, raises concerns about the role these companies play in NIH decision making," the letter continued.

“While the report does not indicate that Dr. Collins or Dr. Fauci received payments from the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, the NIH’s close financial ties to the entity, and its early dismissal of the lab leak theory, cannot be ignored and warrant further examination.”

The COVID vaccine was funded by U.S. taxpayers but developed by private pharmaceutical companies.

Of further concern, late last week Sen. Ron Johnson asked the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services to look into the possibility that federal government scientists concealed records from the public, including about COVID-19.

The Wisconsin Republican’s request was partially in response to a House subcommittee’s discovery that an NIAID senior adviser was using private email addresses to dodge Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Dr. David Morens, who advised former NIAID Director Fauci, said in a Sept. 29, 2021, email that he would “always try to communicate over gmail [sic] because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” according to records received by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Concealing records related to the pandemic is especially concerning given repeated claims by Fauci and others that COVID could not have been developed in a laboratory, but must have been naturally occurring.

In conclusion, a lot of things in life amount to trade-offs.

You have the opportunity to earn more income in the private sector, but if you don’t produce you’re going to find yourself out on the street.

Working in the public sector, on the other hand, traditionally offers job security, but at the expense of lower compensation. That general rule is supposed to apply to all government positions — including elective office.

But increasingly we’ve seen members of Congress apparently engage in insider stock trades, and former Democratic presidents (and at least one former vice president) become multimillionaires.

“An honest public servant can't become rich in politics,” former President Harry S. Truman once remarked. “He can only attain greatness and satisfaction by service.”

That should be especially true for public health officials, but they’ve apparently been trading public health in for personal wealth.

Truman’s quote has since been reduced to, “You can't get rich in politics unless you're a crook,” and that should hold true for bureaucrats as well.

Washington, D.C. has become a den of thieves, and the American public has become their victim.