Originally posted on Quora March 30, 2023
NIH and NIAID scientists are bought and paid for by Pfizer and Moderna through royalties.
As I mentioned in part 2 of When the Media Says “Experts” They Mean Paid Corporate Shills, NIH and NIAID employees routinely receive undisclosed royalty payments for IP they license to Pharmaceutical conglomerates for millions of dollars which although considerably large to the average Joe is pennies on dollar compared to the billions in profits big pharma reaps from these monopolies. Even though the payout for the former looks measly next to the windfalls for the latter such an incestuous financial relationship will inevitably engender uncritical attitudes and deference towards the latter at the expense of John Q Citizen who receives no royalty payments or dividends for the investment.
Privatize Profits Socialize Costs
The citizens are fleeced twice: first paying the NIH $32 billion for research grants that controls what research is done and leads to break through drugs that are patented by NIAID scientists which are then licensed to Pharma corps to price gouge the same citizens who paid for the initial research. Rinse and repeat. For instance, Moderna recently paid NIAID scientists $400 million for ‘certain patent rights concerning stabilizing prefusion coronavirus spike proteins.’ For millions in royalty payments Moderna made billions in profits and recently marked up their booster shot over 600% from the primary series that cost $20.69 per dose to over $130 per dose. The $400 million payment represents just 1% of their vaccine sales over the last two years. Even though Pfizer/Bio-N-Tech did not participate in Operation warp speed’s $18 billion taxpayer investment and their vaccine research was instead paid for by German taxpayers, the research behind the RNA tech and spike protein discovery they used was funded by NIH, NIAID and DARPA research grants; this research was seminal to the very founding of Moderna in 2010. NIAID spent $2.3 million on 6 projects that contributed to the development of mRNA tech and $8.4 million for 24 projects that contributed to the discovery of spike protein. In 2011 DARPA paid CureVac and In-Cell-Art $33 million to test mRNA vaccines against rabies. In 2013 DARPA paid Moderna $25 million to develop mRNA vaccines against Zika and Chikungunya viruses. The NIH has spent upwards of $6 billion on the development of mRNA vaccines used by both Pfizer and Moderna. Despite large public concessions for the research and discoveries that went into their vaccine IP, Pfizer has decided to price gouge that same public marking up their bivalent 650% from its primary series price that they made a decent 26% profit margin on.