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220517_EP61_PART-1_YNIH & The Corruption of Science

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:00:00] Did the NIH have any reason to behave the way it did during COVID? Yes, the answer is yes. There were 350 million reasons for them to do what they did, and I think it caused harm. Hello everyone. Dr. Chris Martenson Here. Thanks for coming by and it’s good to be back with you here today. Listen, we’re going to be talking about incentives today and this FOI request by open the books. Who figured out that the NIH has been receiving kickbacks from pharma companies? So here we go. Let me see if I can get my drawn tool out here because I love to draw. So let’s go here.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:00:43] Episode 61 Today. Perverse incentives. That’s what I’m talking about. I think they cause deaths and suffering because if, you know, the United States didn’t just have a bad outcome relative to other developed nations, it had bad outcomes compared to any other nations, developed or not. And so there’s a reason for that. And we’re going to get into that reason here today. But first, let’s make sure we have this shared understanding. I love this quote by Charlie Munger, right hand man, four decades of Warren Buffett. Charlie said, Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome. Meaning very simply, this is just human nature, something that we’ve known about since time immemorial and. When humans have various incentives, they behave in certain ways. It’s just how it is. All species do this. In fact, you know, if you want to train dogs, if you want to train birds, if you want to train horses, it doesn’t matter. Any organism that responds to incentives is trainable in a certain way. So humans are no different. And this has been the oldest, most reliable way to get humans to behave in a certain way is with money.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:01:52] This goes way back, remember? You know, the saying has been said. Money is the root of all evil. It’s not true. It’s the full quote. The full quote is for the love of money is the root of all evil. Money itself is a neutral concept. Love of money describes your relationship to money. Well, we have a very perverse relationship with money here in our culture right now. If you can make money at it, it’s pretty much accepted and all sorts of things happen. Chemical companies make things that harm the Earth, but they make money at it, so they kind of get a free pass. You know, weapons manufacturing companies, they make money at it. So, you know, it’s all that we have idol worship around money. So money is a really big thing, right? Our most famous people four decades ago included people like Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe, of course, a celebrity, no surprise there, but also Albert Einstein. Today, if you really want to be, you know, in in the top of societal pyramids right now, you might just be a hedge fund manager or a private equity manager, somebody who makes money with money. And we idolize that. We revere that. So money is a very powerful influencer. Of course it is. So Charlie Munger said, you show me the incentive. Let me qualify that. You show me the monetary incentive, I’ll show you the outcome. In this case, I’m talking about randomized controlled trials, because we know now that pharma companies, when they design a trial because they have an outcome they want to see, 90% of the time they get exactly the result. They’re looking for surprise. Right. So that’s what Munger said. But I think we have to go a little further than that.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:03:27] The corollary one layer deeper by Thomas Sowell says, quote, “It’s hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” End quote. Bravo. Very well said. There’s nothing worse than putting decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong or pay no price for the consequences or the outcomes of their particular decisions. So why are we talking about that? We’re talking about that because of this open the books. They had an investigation and they didn’t just Foya, but they had to file a federal suit in order to pry out of the NIH. This information, quote, foresees royalties in the 350 million royalty payment stream hidden by the NIH. Now, I love these people that open the books. Who are they? They say here, quote, They work hard to capture and post all disclose spending at every level of government, federal, state and local. In 2021, they filed 47,000 Freedom of Information Act requests and successfully captured $12 trillion in public expenditures. Well done. I love that. And so as a government watchdog organization, they accept no government funding incentives. They’re telling you where their incentives are. So if they did accept government funding now, we’d have to question whether they were really fully and completely filing the FOIA request that they were. Of course, they got it. So great organization here to figure this out. And by the way, they are a501c3 nonprofit. So if you feel like giving money to a company or an organization that’s doing a really good job, this would be one of them. So good job here and now we’re going to rest on their good hard work and find out Andrew Gorski here at Sorry and Adam Andrezjeski yeah.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:05:27] Andrew Ski Adam Andrew Nevsky writes quote, “Last year, the National Institute of Health, Anthony Fauci’s employer doled out $30 billion in government grants to roughly 56,000 recipients. The largesse of taxpayer money buys a lot of favor and clout within the scientific research and health care industries,” end quote. 56,000 recipients. These are individual researchers working at organizations or universities. These are universities. These are other entities. These are NGOs. These are these are you name it. But they’re in all 50 U.S. states, probably some non-U.S. states, maybe even in Wuhan. Right. So that 30 billion that’s money. That’s money coming out. That is 30 billion cash going out. You can buy a lot of favors with that. Also a lot of fealty. Anthony Fauci is clearly run the nation. Nyad, like the Godfather, might have run a mob. Right? With one big exception. At least the mob didn’t go after children. Right. Anthony Fauci’s Nyad’s we’re going to show here has been absolutely complicit in doing things that are, to me, horrifying as a scientist, as a parent, as a citizen, as a human. So let’s talk about this. First, we’ll go for the corruption that I believe is contained within this story, carrying on quote. However, in our breaking investigation, we found hundreds of millions of dollars in payments also flow the other way. These are royalty payments from third party payers think pharmaceutical companies back to the NIH and individual NIH scientists. We estimate that between fiscal years 2010 and 2020, more than $350 million in royalties were paid by third parties to the agency and NIH scientists who are credited as co inventors, end quote. Why are NIH scientists receiving royalties at all? Why? So here’s a thing If you work for IBM and you invent something and a patent gets filed on it.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:07:26] Kind of belongs to IBM. Right. It makes sense. So you’re drawing a paycheck. You know, it may be that that IBM has to fund a lot of different people whose efforts don’t end up in a in a productive pattern. But when you work for the NIH, you’re working with and for the taxpayer with taxpayer money for taxpayers, that’s it. You’re in a public role. You’re using lots and lots of taxpayer money in order to. Draw your paycheck. Use the equipment. All the research supplies, everything. And then when you find something out, you get the private benefit of that. It’s a little bit weird to me. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but worse, it creates conflicts of interests that are pretty bad. 350 million conflicts of interest, I think. So carrying on quote, because those payments enrich the agency and its scientists. Each and every royalty payment could be a potential conflict of interest and needs disclosure. Recently our organization to open the bookstore com forced NIH forced NIH to disclose over 22,100 royalty payments totaling nearly $134 million paid to the agency and nearly 1700 NIH scientists. These payments occurred during the most recently available period, which is 2009 to 2014. That’s most recently available to us and 14. That’s like eight years ago. Quote The production is the result of our federal lawsuit versus the NIH. The agency admits to holding 3000 pages of line by line royalty since 2009. So far, they’ve only produced 1200 pages. The next 1800 pages of production will cover the period from 2015 to 2020. I am especially interested in 2020, aren’t you? I’ll guarantee you that’s the last set of documents they released and they’re going to be super heavily redacted. And we’ll find out why in just a second.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:09:23] So I could imagine actually putting a Martenson tack on if I could be so bold to the amazing quote by Thomas Sowell, which would be, quote, It’s hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. And who secretly get rich at the same time.” That’s my take on. So that’s what’s been happening here. So, hey, before I carry on, first things first. I have the great honor that this show is being sponsored, and it’s being sponsored by Secure Dotcom. Secure uses proprietary encryption to provide fully private and secure instant messaging and email. All communication is held securely in Swiss servers without using any of the big tech platforms. Listen. In today’s day and age, your email or messages or even bank information can easily be intercepted by bad actors. Your private information, pictures, chat and email are consistently mined and sold by big tech. When you use a free product, you are the product. Secure never minds your data and never asks for your phone number. You can easily and securely communicate with both secure users and non secure users alike, allowing you to send completely secure emails to your doctor, banker, lawyer, or anyone else. You can even set a time to destruct the message. Even your internet provider can’t pick on your emails. Secure is your solution to stop the constant unauthorized use of your digital identity. And it costs only $5 a month for the messenger or $10 per month for the messenger and email. Go to secure dot com and take back your privacy today that’s secure. Broadcom peek insiders get 25% off or if you’re not an insider promo code peek 15 gets you a limited time 15% off.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:11:08] So thank you to secure for being the sponsor here. And now we’ll get back to our program. All right. How about this, then? Well, I got away with it. Why is Anthony Fauci receiving anything at all? I have questions about this. We’re getting into that a little bit more in the next couple of slides here. But look at this in 2005, 2005, 2005, following an AP investigation, the NIH expressed concern. They expressed concern over the royalty payments being a potential conflict of interest. Now it’s got nothing potential about it. Those are really full on conflicts of interest guaranteed quote. Even Dr. Fauci said that he felt it was inappropriate to receive payment and donated the entire amount to charity, according to the NIH. The entire amount of of whatever had been identified during that AP investigation, 2005, I’m pretty sure nothing’s been donated since then, but I would love to be happily corrected on that if it turns out to be wrong. Quote, The personal royalties are legal, but there is an apparent lack of transparency around them. It wasn’t until after the AP investigation in 2005 that the NIH created a policy to disclose the payments. Hmm. Okay. At least they’re making some some headway here, I guess. Well, the national desk spoke to open the books Adam Andrezejeski, who explained how it took a federal lawsuit to receive access to the disclosures at any age, began making 2005. So what we do and I thought it was a policy and now you have to have not even you can’t even get access to these documents by foil. You have to have a lawsuit apparently, quote, Even then, important information in the disclosure documents was redacted, such as who the payments came from and how much was doled out.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:13:00] Okay, so so here’s here’s how this is. Okay. You consider that important information. So the NIH set a policy that they’re going to not do this anymore or be more transparent about it. And instead of any of that, of course, what did we get? We got them saying, all right, you have to pry this information out of our cold, dead hands with a federal lawsuit. And then we’re going to redact who paid the money and who got it. Except for that, we’re being pretty open and transparent. This is ridiculous. Full stop. I mean, come on. This is totally unacceptable. Completely 100% unacceptable unless you live in a corrupt society that so far gone that people could reasonably disagree with that conclusion because the complexities here, they might say, but there really aren’t. There really aren’t. All right. So open the books was only able to verify a topline number for the total amount given to NIH scientists via these royalty payments, as well as the total number of payments given each scientist. But that’s it, not how much or in individual amounts or who it came from. That’s the ultimate conflict of interest. Would it be would it be reasonable to know that the CEO of Exxon was receiving money directly from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Possibly. Right. Would you want to know that a witness in a trial was receiving money from one side or the other? Possibly could create a conflict of interest. All right. But reading back here NGF, she noted to Tandy how the agency is slow walking the release of its disclosure documents and relating to the royalty payments that open the books had to sue access to after the FOIA request was ignored. So they ignored FOIA requests, got sued, got forced to hand these documents out, redacted them heavily.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:14:50] According to Andrezjeski, the NIH admitted to holding 3000 pages worth of disclosure information related to the royalty payments, but is only releasing 300 payments pages a month and quote, Guarantee you I know what’s in those last pages. See that last two over 300 is going to be the money shot because we’re going to see a lot of what happened in 2020. And I’m going to show you why I think that’s ridiculously important coming right up. So first question. First question is, why is the NIH being as secretive as, say, the State Department? You know, we have to redact everything you can’t know. Well, listen, they say that you have freedom in a society when the government fears the people and you have tyranny when the people feel fear of the government. Clearly, we’re somewhere halfway between those two extremes. When the now feels is a public agency, it doesn’t really have to abide by rules or laws or disclosures, and you don’t really deserve to have access to this information. They’re more important. They get to decide what they want to tell you about and when and how. Right. Which means they’re not really over here on the side of serving the public. They’re somewhere far down the line of serving themselves. Okay, so let’s carry back here. Note here. I went to the nature’s own website this morning, found out that the NIH, his mission is to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems in the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability. And they have four goals. Look at goal number four down there in yellow goal quote to exemplify and promote the highest level of scientific integrity, public accountability and social responsibility in the conduct of science.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:16:38] End quote. Well, I guess my question then, NIH, is how does failing to with disclose conflicts of interests enhance any of those goals? How does it. How does it enhance your scientific integrity or. Accountability, public accountability. I mean, it undermines all of those. So here’s here’s a life lesson for me. Another Martenson tip Trust what people do, not what they say. Words are cheap. Actions are where everything hits the road. So the NIH is words are lofty and good, but their actions are very much undermining scientific integrity, accountability, trustworthiness, and probably as a consequence of all of those. Public good, which means actually getting to their mission of enhancing human health. You can’t do that if you’re all conflicted in your accidentally or not. So accidentally promoting things that pad your personal wallet versus things that are best for patients and public health. All right. So that’s the NIH is own thing. Secondarily, like, well, I thought she’s been a career bureaucrat for 50 years. I mean, he is the Godfather. He’s he’s well, he’s very famous in Washington for knowing if you read the real Anthony Fauci by RFK Junior, you will find out who Fauci really is. And he’s like The Godfather. He doles out that 30 billion, you know, and if you disappoint him, like, there’s no compunction about, you know, saying that Washington University will lose all of its grant funding if you disappoint him or, you know, maybe even the state of Missouri. Right. So. So there’s it’s he’s been playing a game, but I can guarantee you something he hasn’t been doing is putting on the white lab coat, operating a pipette, spinning up a centrifuge and reading a simulator. Right. He’s been not been doing actual lab work.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:18:25] So why is he listed as an inventor on, say, patent number 9441041, which was in September of 2016, is when the patent data came out and it was filed in September of 2015. There’s no chance in the world Anthony Fauci was legitimately contributing to this particular patent in any other way than making sure that it had all the money it needed, right? Yeah, we could say it’s an important contribution, but not as like a principal investigator inventor. By the way, look back at this thing to notice. It’s this is for the use of antagonists of the interaction between HIV GP 120 that GP 120 protein in the HIV human immune human immunodeficiency virus, that GP 120 protein is the very same one that accidentally somehow has four sequences arrayed right around the edge of the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. Somehow, those GP 120 proteins that Fauci was busy co inventing treatments for ended up arrayed all around the spike protein in critical spots where actual binding in interactions can happen. So I got some questions about that too, because now we can begin to weave this story of actual deep conflicts of interest. So if Tony Fauci owns patents on things that could make money, if a GP 120 inhibitor was found to be useful in treating COVID, oh my gosh. That is a very, very big, very lucrative sort of a patent out there. So we might understand a little bit we’re starting to unravel a little bit about what’s going on with these conflicts of interest and why they’re so important. I can’t believe I have to be the one talking about this. This should be just completely obvious, total common knowledge out there in the world about the role of incentives in shaping behavior.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:20:17] Remember, you show me the incentive. I’ll show you the outcome. Thank you for that one. Charlie Munger So carrying on just a little bit, let’s just a brief review of what the NIH needed did or didn’t do during COVID first. Fauci and others, we know that they helped create the pandemic by funding risky gain of function research at the very of the very source that somehow somehow came out of a lab, possibly the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly somewhere else. But it’s the signature couldn’t be more clear, as well as the Trail of Money, as well as the grant applications by EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak organization, as well as all the work that had been going on at USC through Ralph Baric and coronavirus research and coronavirus vaccine research that had all been going on prior to 2020. This is now completely obvious. All right, too, would be this idea that the NIH and the CDC and the FDA, they all conspired. And I’m using that word very carefully. They conspired to block promising but cheap early treatments. Never once told anybody about vitamin D and invariably supported policies that made things worse, not better. So lockdowns promoting fear. Oh, my God, look at all these cases while they blurred what a case was and use PCR tests to amplify those cases. What’s wrong with promoting fear? Well, fear and anxiety are enormous destroyers of the immune system, and the more destroyed the immune system is, the more likely it is that somebody is going to get COVID and have a bad run at it. Vitamin D is an enhancer of the immune system. Lockdowns are destroyers of the immune system. Invariably, every single time we saw the CDC, the FDA and the NIH and Fauci come along and make a set of recommendations, they invariably were on the side of doing things that somehow magically awfully made the pandemic worse and led to worse outcomes and more deaths.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:22:16] And that is why you have to hold your public health authorities accountable for something. We should probably hold them accountable. For public health total outcomes, not individual outcomes as between you and your doctor. Total Outcomes. United States deaths per million worst outcomes pretty much of almost any developed nation out there. How do we explain that? Well, bad, bad, bad policies. Number three, the needs treatment guidelines coupled with the Prep Act, which is the pandemic response emergency something act that led hospitals to be incentivized to stick to obviously losing treatment strategies. That includes remdesivir for people who were coming into the hospital very sick. That includes putting people on ventilators. How did it incentivize them? It’s very clear the prep act says that if a hospital or a a doctor or health care provider is following CDC or NIH guidelines, they’re liable liable from they have immunity from liability. But if they go off that reservation, if they decide to do something else, it hasn’t explicitly been anointed and granted and blessed by the NIH or the CDC. Now they’re kind of exposed to liability. So, you know, hospitals aren’t places where doctors and patients get together. First and foremost, they are tombs of ensconce meant for administrators, lawyers and administrators, CEOs and all that stuff anyway. Those people are very incentivized not to have any liability whenever possible. So they looked at the rules and they said, We can’t get in trouble for doing this stuff. So whoever sets this stuff has enormous power in this conversation. And so that’s what happened. Number three was the CDC, the FDA, the NIH. They all got together and they said, here are some things you can do and a bunch of things you can’t do and those things that you could do.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:24:01] We now know where some of the worst things you could possibly do for patients if you cared about things like them surviving or not coming out of there with long COVID or other long term sequelae or if they not dying. Right. Okay. And then number four in this list is this mono maniacal focus on vaccines and vaccines only for everyone, regardless of exclusionary medical background criteria. Like I tend to get, you know, anaphylactic reactions like, we don’t care. Everybody’s got to get this thing. No medical exceptions or statistical risk, right. That wasn’t taken into account. I mean, come on. We knew that like 98% of all the deaths happened above age 70, you know, and then it fell off very, very rapidly. Why would you demand that everybody who bore almost no statistical risk had to get this as a condition of continued employment, flying access to things like license in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, all over Europe. Crazy, right? But it happened. And worse. They used a leaky vaccine that they knew was leaky in the midst of a pandemic, which in which assured ended up assuring that that pandemic was going to last longer, not shorter. And so this was all known about I’ve talked about this, you know, extensively for a couple of years now. So that’s the backdrop to all of this. So the question is, is this just like incompetence, pure incompetence? Will the answer? No, it can’t be because pure incompetence, coin flip every so often you’ll get it right when you get it wrong every single time. And you see, remember that old adage from the military that once is an accident, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action. Well, dozens of times we watched this.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:25:45] The decision was always made towards more fear, more lockdowns, more centralized control, more profits flowing into the pharma companies, more and more and more this way. And there was not as much there were or no decisions going the other way, which was to notice that things that were actually working there were zero trips to other countries that figured this out to the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, figured it out, learned how to manage this disease very, very well from a public health standpoint. Could have spent a couple of pennies going over there and figuring it out, but nobody was interested in that because of the incentives. The incentives, if you went over and did that and actually figured out if we had done what Uttar Pradesh had done here in the United States, sure, we would have saved, you know, maybe, you know, a few hundred thousand lives. But a lot of people would have lost billions of dollars in profits. That’s all we need to understand. It’s not hard. It’s just part of where we are is humans. So carrying on this corruption at the NIH, though, this isn’t anything new. So they referred in that earlier article we read together about this 2005 inquiry by the AP. This is in the British Medical Journal here in 2005. This is you can actually find this on PubMed. So this is within the NIH system. And they were worried or noting back then these royalty payments are to staff and researchers at the NIH creates causing troubles. They’re, quote, patients who took part in clinical trials at the U.S. NIH had no idea that scientists at the institutes received $8.9 million in royalty payments and might benefit financially. The use of their discoveries by pharmaceutical companies and device makers.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:27:27] Reports from the Associated Press allege that was proven. This information was not made public until the press agency obtained this information after filing a request under the Freedom of Information Act and, quote, So informed consent, which, by the way, it’s my Thursday program at 7:00 on Thursdays. It’s live it’s a live cast. Come on by if you want it, if you like this kind of content. Thursdays at seven, we talk about informed consent. What’s the name of the program? We talk about all kinds of things. But informed consent fundamentally means that a patient is given all the information they need to make a balanced decision. So it could include the risks of a particular treatment in the benefits. But is well, the conflict of interest needs to be noted. For example, let’s imagine regretfully you come down with a condition, you go to your doctor and your doctor says, Well, here’s the best treatment for you. I really think we should get you on this. Let’s go. That’s one layer of information. But what would happen if the doctor said this is a $30,000 treatment I want to put you on, by the way, I get a $10,000 kickback from the pharma company when I prescribe this. Or you could take this thousand dollar medicine, which seems to be about as good, but I don’t get any money back from that one. Now, you have more decision, more more ability to make an informed consent kind of a decision. Right. So clearly, this is the NIH was caught with their hands in the cookie jar. They were caught not disclosing huge conflicts of interest to patients who they were pulling into clinical trials. That’s a no no. In an honest world, they would face consequences.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:28:56] People would have been fired, jobs would have been lost. Possibly people would have had to pay money back, maybe even gone to jail, depending on the level of violation they had committed. But in my world of science, the one I’m trying desperately to resurrect, if not defend, rearguard action, it’s one where integrity is really, really important. You know, you need the whole peer review system doesn’t work without integrity, right? Because let’s be honest in peer review. But they hold it up like a gold standard, like, oh, is that journal, is that paper been peer reviewed or not? Well, if it hasn’t been well, I can’t trust it. But listen, I have peer reviewed papers and had papers peer reviewed. Let me tell you a little something about the system. It doesn’t actually work unless the person doing the peer review has integrity, because more often than not, you’re tapped because you’re an expert in the field. You get this paper is supposed to be anonymous. You don’t know who wrote it, but you look at the research and you’re like, Oh, that’s totally Bob, right? And I hate Bob. I hate his work. And we’re in conflict. And I feel like Bob Steele and some of my you know, I mean, I’m in competition with Bob for limited grant dollars. So I’m going to I’m just going to trash Bob’s paper. Right. You’re kind of counting on that not happening. But it does because humans are humans. Incentives are what they are. Right. So at any rate, look at this here coming back. So the press agency AP reported that 916 present and former NIH researchers received annual royalty payments averaging 9700 bucks, kind of small, but could have received as much as $150,000. At the same time, the NIH researchers spent millions in taxpayer dollars studying the treatments that they had developed that were licensed to drug companies.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:30:36] So so the receiving money back from things that they use taxpayer money to develop that they then license out to pharma companies didn’t have to spend any of that money. Right. So to a pharma company to just license something out where you don’t have to spend all the money to actually discover it, it’s a pretty good deal. Right. So here’s the system, taxpayers. Throw all this money in the NH uses it pays themselves handsome salaries, really nice pension and retirement benefits and things like that. And has all this fancy lab equipment takes no risk, no career risk, no nothing. Just fools around and finds good stuff. I’m totally okay with that process, but then they say, we own it, it’s ours. I have the patent on this, right? And I’m going to license this out to a pharma company and get money back. That’s where I fall apart in this whole story because that’s not how it’s supposed to work. Right. Can you imagine, like U.S. Army said? Well, I know we went over to Iraq and we attacked them and then we found a lot of gold. And we decided to share that with the soldiers who were in the platoon that found the Gold Coast, you know, kind of finders keepers. Right. You know, that’s what they’re doing here at the NIH. Is this sort of finders keepers mentality. Not cool. All right. This is the funny part. If you like your humor dark. So a patient advocacy group called the Alliance for Human Research Protection says that patients might have thought differently about the risks of the trial treatment if they knew of scientists financial interests. You think? Of course, the NIH has been criticized before for not disclosing conflicts of interest of five years ago.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:32:14] That would be in the year 2000. Just before leaving office, Donna Shalala, then secretary of the HHS, issued a requirement. That scientists disclose their financial interests. But nothing happened until the AP investigations. So. Huh. Oh, there was a requirement. But then h decided. Yeah, you know why? There’s just a requirement that our boss, our uber boss put down on us all this laugh. Follow it. We don’t really need to write in in private world over here in real world where real people have real jobs. You get in trouble for stuff like that. You might lose your position. The CEO says, Here’s what we’re going to do. And you’re just like, I’ve got my own ideas about how I want to run this thing. Ideas that personally enrich me and undermine science, undermine public confidence, deliver shoddy results, and invariably corrupt the system I’m supposed to be administrating. If you’re a mid-level manager and you’re CEO says not to do that, and then you do it and all those bad outcomes happen, you should get canned. Right, right away. Did that happen? No, not so much. So sorry for the title, but it’s how I feel. This reads best. The A’s press agency reported the two leading researchers and this is 2005. So Anthony Fauci is not a household world word at that point in time. Household name Anthony Fauci, head of the NIAID and his deputy, Clifford Lane. Remember that name? Clifford Lane. It’s going to appear again in just a minute. Receive payments relating to the development of interleukin two. Fauci explained that the government patented the development and share. O Dr. Lane told the BMJ the payment was part of this federal compensation. It’s part of my federal compensation. Guess what, Dr. Lane? That means it’s part of public record.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:34:06] Then you can’t hide it because the salaries and payments of that go to compensation for every public employee at every level are completely public knowledge at all moments in time. So the one that he’s trying to say, it’s just part of my federal compensation but didn’t have to tell anybody about it. Why is it different at the nature? I don’t understand. Anyway, he explained, Doctor Lane did that. The government patented the development, shared the payments it received with the inventors. Oh, very nicely. The government doesn’t usually. Usually. Isn’t that nice? Since 1997, he’s received about 45 grand. He says the institute’s awarded $36 million in grants and studies to test the treatment. So public money comes in. You develop an idea, you patent it, and then you hand out $36 million, 36 million to test your treatment. And if it works, hey, this all comes back around and is good quote. Dr. Anthony Fauci told the BMJ that as a government employee, he was required by law to put his name on the patent for the development of interleukin two required by law. Was this one of those laws that slipped into a 27,000 inert and 12 page, you know, omnibus funding bill? You know, it’s some two in the morning by somebody. Really? Federal law required him to put his name. Okay. And he was also required by law to receive part of the payment. That the government received for use of venues requirements will require. My hands are tied. I couldn’t. I had to. But once they pointed this out to him, he said that he felt it was inappropriate to receive payment and donated the entire amount to charity. Probably the entire amount related to this one thing they dug up. I’ll guarantee you that there have been other amounts that have not been given to charity, but I hope I’m wrong about that and would love to be proven wrong.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:35:53] So. Anthony Fauci. If you can prove that, you can show us that you’ve donated all the rest of the royalty payments because you obviously understand that it’s inappropriate to receive payments of the sort. We would love to see that. Please supply those records. Both doctors, that’s Fauci and Lane told Associated Press that they had been concerned about an apparent conflict of interest for some time before the agency story appeared. Both doctors. We’d been concerned about this apparent conflict of interests for some time before your story even came out. We were already concerned about that. Now that your story’s come out, now we’ve donated our money and it won’t happen again. Because, you know, and just by what the BMJ was told by an NRA spokesperson, on the other hand, that the NIH had no plans to put information about payments to US researchers on its website and that the BMJ would have to make a request via the FOIA, FOIA to find out royalty payments to individual researchers. And they were even lying then because now that opened the books, tried to do a few, got rebuffed or ignored, then went to a federal lawsuit. They still couldn’t find out the royalty payments to individual researchers by source. So they’re just hiding, hiding, hiding, hiding. And they’ve been doing this for a long time. So the new age to the public basically saying that if you we’re not we don’t serve you. That’s crazy talk. You serve us. So they got it exactly. Upside down and backwards now. Now we have to get down to the ultimate conflict of interest. I’m going to bring this all back around to what just happened during COVID, why this is so dark. First, the US, FDA, a lot of you know about this.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:37:29] There’s something called an EUA, which is an emergency use authorization of medical products and related authorities. This is from the FDA website right here. Last updated in January 2017. It requires a variety of things. Section D, no alternatives. Quote in yellow. For FDA to issue an EUA, there must be no adequate approved or an available alternative to the candidate product for diagnosing, preventing or treating the disease or condition in question. There must be no adequate there must be nothing. There can’t be anything. If there was anything out there that could possibly treat in an effective way, then the EUA doesn’t apply. So what do we have under way? Well, all the vaccines have come under way at this point in time. Remdesivir was authorized under EUA, etc., etc. A variety of things were authorized under EUA. You get it. You know, listen, you’re in a pandemic. You know, there’s emergency. You would want something like an emergency use authorization to allow people to go out and use something if you think it worked. But you would have to have some sort of observation, some reason to suspect that thing actually worked and worked in the way it did. And then once something better came along, you’d pull the EUA for this and you’d go with that new thing, whatever that happened to be. So here’s where it gets a little dark. I think this is the ultimate conflict of interest. Public Citizen in June of 2020 dug this up about the NIH vaccine. Quote, The U.S. government may jointly own a potential coronavirus vaccine. The NIH has played a critical role in coronavirus research for years. Building off this work, federal scientists have helped design and test more than a1273a vaccine candidate developed in partnership with Moderna.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:39:09] The Federal Government has filed multiple patents covering mRNA1273. In this report, we described two patent applications that list federal scientists as co inventors. If the government successfully pursued its patent filings, the resulting patents would likely confer significant rights and money. We also review recently disclosed contracts between NIH and Moderna. The agreement suggests that NIH has not transferred its rights but instead maintains a joint stake, which is indeed the case. So carrying on down this, they continue to write in that Public Citizen report here about U.S. application number 16, slash three, four, four, comma, seven, seven, four. In 2016, federal scientists in partnership with academic researchers developed a new way to stabilize coronavirus spike proteins. The approach required two amino acids known as proline or proline, probably proline two proteins between the central helix, and they have to add repeat. It’s called the two P approach. The stabilized spike protein for an earlier ad coronavirus produced a stronger immune response at a lower dose than the naturally occurring protein. So this is a good thing, you would think. Okay, so if we’re going to put this money into a human body and we injected in, we want a strong response from the body, so we’re going to stabilize the spike protein. The invention was figuring out where to put these two proteins. Right. Good work. They figured it out. Stabilizes the spike protein. Now, first question, how long does a stabilized spike protein last and why does it confer a stronger immunogenic response? Is it because it sticks around longer because the body can’t clear that spike protein? Good question. These would be the sorts of things you would normally ask and answer during an extended process of vaccine development. You would say, hey, we have this idea.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:41:01] We’re going to put this totally jury rigged protein where we’ve done some things to it back into a body. And now we want to know a couple of things. A, how much of that protein is actually produced? B, does it stay where we think it’s going to stay? See what kind of an immune response does it actually develop and generate? Is it more of just an antibody response or is it a more holistic complement, including the innate immune system with T cells and all that? And then. Does it actually have any harms all on its own? Because it’s a whole new substance. We can’t say, oh, you know, there’s spike proteins that exists on coronaviruses and we gave the spike protein to humans. They’re the same thing. They’re not that double proline stabilization says this is now a brand new protein, possibly with brand new biological impacts and effects within the body. In fact, if we looked at the crossover of the impact of the biological activity of the wild type protein and this new one that humans have made, I’m sure they overlap quite a bit. There’s a lot of Venn diagram overlap, but there’s going to be some territory that’s unique and different to both of them. And of course, you’d want to characterize that, understand it, understand it very, very well. Was any of that done well? No. We’re figuring that out now on the fly, of course. So carrying on. So who were these scientists who were named on this on this one patent, on this one thing? So I hunted down. And so here we find that the lead inventor is Barney Graham from the NIAID. And Co-inventor is include a bunch of people from the Scripps Institute there. I see four or five on their Scripps Institute?

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:42:38] Isn’t that the place where Christian Anderson works? He the virologist who spent all that time working with Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins and Andrew Tayback and sorry, Lawrence Tabak and all those other people at NIH. And I had to squelch the lab origin story. Yeah. That was him. And isn’t his boss there? I think Eric Topol or they work there together. And Eric Topol. You know, if you’ve seen him on Twitter, Dr. Topol is very, very active in promoting fear and lockdowns and all sorts of things like that. And now we can begin to develop an idea around this because we can see that if these people who we see on this list right here, these are co inventors, right on this particular spike protein. So we got the Scripps Institute people there and oh, who else? Nad we’ve got like one, two, three, four people from now on there. These are all people who stand to get really wealthy if and only if there are no other approved. Things that can be used for the way is intact. And if and only if this thing is used and used very, very widely out in public, both of those things came to pass. So you can understand there’s an enormous conflict of interest there. Right. Because these people are very incentivized to make sure that this vaccine gets out and into public use and is used widely. Anything that would prevent that from happening would unless these are really honorable people. They’re going to be conflicted about. You know, I can’t imagine any of these if my name is on that. And let me just be completely honest. Well, I’m a human, too. So if my name is on that patent, I’m going to be looking at that going, whew, you know, my family is set up for generations to come.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:44:18] This is like, you know, money, grab time. And I’m going to it’s going to be very hard for me to be really aggressively out there looking for and supporting things that maybe would end up violating that or taking the easy way and making it irrelevant or removing it. I wouldn’t be I wouldn’t be doing that. It’s just part of the game, right? Well, I’m hedging a little because I probably would. I still anyway, I have a hard time acting out of integrity, but these people, it’s normal, it happens, it’s a human thing. So these people here are heavily, heavily interested in seeing their careers and their personal gain advanced by this pattern going through. And they’re going to be a little bit more resistant to things like, let’s just say I, if I, I could easily I could imagine these people here going, Oh, you want me to review a study on ivermectin? They’re going to look at it very, very, very critically, much with a much more focused attention than they would say, something that wouldn’t conflict with that each way, such as another substance, such as remdesivir, which got a free pass, even though the clinical trials, they had to shift end points and do a lot of sketchy stuff and it didn’t help. In fact, the death signal off of it looks a little worse. Right? And it just didn’t do anything positive. It did a lot of negative stuff, except it also made billions of dollars for certain people. So I think we’re starting to understand how this system works. So let’s go here. So I forgot to change this around. So this part here, I have to shift a little bit. So number one, we saw that the staff at the NIH in nearly every research university draw their salaries directly or indirectly from any age funding.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:46:10] And that age is run by The Godfather. Right. So you just don’t want to disappoint that guy, right? If you know, how did Upton Sinclair, the author, put it? He said never. Expect to require a man to understand something if his salary requires him not to. Close, something like that. But the idea is the same like that. When people, salaries or incomes are on the line, it suddenly gets a little tricky to get them to understand something that would maybe take that salary away. So it’s understood and it’s understood by everybody how the game works if you’ve ever been in a university. Small politics at their most brutal politics or politics, it’s all about if you disappoint the person who’s like feeding all that money to your university, your university might get cut off. That’s a very big disincentive to raising your voice against the person who’s handing that money out. So that’s part one. Part two is the staff at the university, researchers, as well as all the respective institutions they stood to gain if and only if. In this particular example,Moderna 1273 was approved under the way, stood to gain nothing if that didn’t happen. So now we begin to develop the incentives there. And three is all about how the way required there to be nothing to be no competition so or anything that would make it go away. So that’s what we see here in this particular storyline. And oops, I still didn’t get right comp. Uh, it should close. All right. So that’s the storyline. So this is really the ultimate conflict of interests is just magnificent. It’s enormous. So let’s go there. This is the NIH treatment guidelines panel. These are the people who decided at the NIH what sorts of things would be covered under the Prep Act? What are the approved treatments for COVID 19? They did a miserable, terrible, awful job.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:48:08] Here are a few of their names. There’s the link if you want to read the rest of the names. But I’m going to point out a few things. Look at who’s number two on this list. On the co-chair, there are three co-chairs Roy Gulick, Clifford Lane, Henry Mazur, Clifford Lane was that person who was caught early on in that 2005 article, same guy working at the NIH, one of Fauci’s most trusted people sitting there on the NIH, COVID treatment panel saying what is in what is out of this whole thing? And look at those universities down there. You’ve got Washington University, Denver Health, Emory University, University of Michigan, Pittsburgh, Mass. General, on and on. Universal, California. This a treatment panel is like the who’s who of major universities receiving the handouts from Fauci at all, whose chief righthand person is sitting right at the top of this panel watching carefully. And I’m sure it’s one of those hyper things where if you voted the wrong way that was observed and next thing you know, you might be the person responsible for dozens of your fellow researchers finding that their grants are underfunded, unfunded, pulled, you know, maybe maybe you lose the funding for your entire university. It’s a real powerful game. It’s it’s pressure politics. These are the conflicted here on this list. And by the way, just to drive this home to show you just how conflicted these people are, it was even all the way to the point that as of yesterday when I pulled this off from the NIH Expert Treatment Panel guidelines off of the Web page for the NIH COVID treatments, look at vitamin D, vitamin D, they conclude as of still as of yesterday here in 2022, there is insufficient evidence for the panel to recommend either for or against the use of vitamin D for the treatment of COVID 19.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:49:57] I underline that because I think that’s weasel wording. So what they cite for their expert summary around this is a single study out of Brazil. About 36 patients in each arm, tiny were people were already in the hospital. They’re deeply sick with COVID. They gave them 200,000 units of vitamin D and asked the question, how many of them improved compared to the controls? And the answer is, that’s a stupid study, right? Why would you design it that way? It’s not even remotely how we would do this, because what the data clearly shows over and over and over again is that people who show up at the hospital, who already have high levels of vitamin D, if you’re above 50 nanograms per AML, the number of those people who then progressed to either ICU or death was a fraction compared to people who had bad vitamin D levels, which would be below 3030 nanograms were AML, and if you were below 20, your chances of ending up in a really bad state were exceptionally high. Because Vitamin D is not just a vitamin, it’s a regulatory hormone of the entire immune system. The data is clear and it’s compelling. But what I just told you was, did it help prevent people from coming to the hospital with COVID in the first place? So they weasel worded it and said, Oh, we don’t have any data support for its use for the treatment and we’re a treatment panel. But in fact, there was nobody anywhere at the NIH on this panel or anywhere to be found who was actually responsible for trying to prevent COVID. Now, why not? That’s clearly something that would fall within the purview of normal medicine. Medicine isn’t just about. Treating people when they get sick.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:51:27] It’s helping them not become sick in the first place. But we didn’t have that. We didn’t have anybody coming out at the national official levels under any president, under Trump, under Biden. Nobody’s doing this telling people, hey, maybe you should lose some weight. Hey, maybe you should have high levels of vitamin D. Hey, maybe you should have other vitamins and supplements topped up above a certain level because we’ve got data on zinc, we have data on selenium, we have data on all sorts of things to suggest that if you are low in them. You would really be benefiting to be boosted by them now. Back to this panel, though. What would happen to this panel if they actually did recommend vitamin D? Well, probably nothing good because vitamin D is not just going to be helpful in in COVID. It’s going to be helpful for all sorts of immune modulated, mediated processes in people. And, of course, there are certain industries out there who don’t make money off of sick people. So they have a conflict of interest. And that same industry is the one funneling the payments back into the hands of these same researchers and university researchers and age researchers. And that is the whole conflict of interest. Will they? Their interests are not aligned with your health, except accidentally from time to time. That’s the story. Hate to be that blunt about it. I know that sounds dark, but it is. It’s just how the world works, right? So, you know, it didn’t have to be this way. But it’s how it is. So we just have to recognize that. And that’s our first opportunity to just accept that this is kind of how the system is, which means we have to become our own best advocates, do our own research, figure out for ourselves that we want to take vitamin D, because nobody’s going to tell you that, let alone do what they should have done, which is right away when we had the Vitamin D information back in early 2020.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:53:10] Was to send vitamin D to every single household with instructions on how to take it, when to take it, with instructions coming to you daily via every social media feed and media outlet to explain this over and over and over again, until we’d gotten enough people of the vitamin D curve that the United States. Instead of having one of the worst. Outcomes of all nations when it comes to COVID. But we would have bumped right up and probably had one of the better outcomes because that’s what the data says. At a minimum, though, when the NIH panel says, oh, there’s no, we don’t have any did we can’t no evidence either for or against. What’s the against what could it possibly be? There’s no downside to taking vitamin D. It’s not like it’s really dangerous. And if you take two pills instead of one, you die. I mean, it’s got a ridiculous safety profile. At worst, say people should maybe get their blood levels checked first and then decide how much they need to take. But but otherwise, it’s it’s it’s a ridiculously safe thing. So the downside is zero except for conflict of interest profits and conflict of interest. And people who don’t make money off of your health, they make money off of your illness and continued illness. And that’s the system we have. And we’ve anointed them as if there are these gods and goddesses and and above reproach, but they’re not they’re very, very much within reproach. And I think we see that extensively here in the fact that we have those two powerhouse hitters from the knee h hanging out right there guiding this panel. All right. So again, from Thomas Sole quote, it’s hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

[00:54:52] With a little Martenson tack: and who also secretly get rich at the same time. That’s really bad. So we have people who who can’t get fired, get in no trouble, aren’t going to jail, bear no consequences for their decisions, but they also get rich. This is a really toxic combo. That’s the world in which we happen to find ourselves right now. And I don’t think there’s any way to reform that. I don’t believe that we can vote anybody in. I don’t know that there’s any way to swap out a couple of folks. That’s one to once a culture becomes so rotten at its core that it’s willing to sacrifice human lives in the furtherance of its own self-interested aims. It’s it’s really not repairable at that point in time. All right. So tell you what, though, I’m also going to be talking about this over further. But I got I’m going to switch gears a little bit, because as bad as COVID is, we got a bunch of red flags and food food shortages. There’s food riots now, as you’ve heard about, of course, energy. Germany’s finally waking up to the idea that it’s actually soul. In this particular story, I don’t know why it took them that long. The economy’s flashing, recessionary signs, markets, all that. Why? Why do I talk about that stuff? Because more people are going to be more harmed, I believe, directly by the economic impacts that happen than from COVID itself. And the COVID story, by the way, that COVID story is is a fractal microcosm of this larger story that that we’re in at this point in time. And so if you want to come by and see this, this is for members only. This is we have a subscription service at Peak Prosperity.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:56:28] People who join, they are. Hey, thank you so much for being part of the tribe. And you you you support what I do so that I’m able to spend this. Reports like this one I just put together took a lot of time, and I have a whole staff of people who help me do what I do, which is bring real information so that you can have informed consent in your life so that you can actually make your own decisions. I’ll give you the data. You’re going to decide what you do with it. And of course, information without action is at best interesting and at worst, anxiety producing. So I don’t care about just giving you information that stirs up the emotions. I care about giving you information that helps you make better decisions or new decisions because, listen, the time is here. It’s really getting very serious out there. This the reason I go through the sort of corruptions things that we just went down with this NIH bit is because yeah, you should know be because that same level of of corruption kind of exists everywhere. It’s at the Department of Energy, it’s in the State Department, it’s in the military industrial complex. It’s in all our major institutions. If somehow lost their sense of public service and it’s all become fairly corrupt, self-interested self-service power, all that other stuff, fine humans do this over and over again. What’s different is we’re going to try at this time in a world of massive shortages with an exponential money system that’s got exponential amounts of debt, including the fact that we just don’t have the resources now available to us to make the same sorts of accidents and mistakes over and over again. So it’s very serious.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:58:02] And if you understand the COVID story, you can begin to understand the larger story of why it’s so important for you to become resilient, find your tribe, get to know people really well, develop new, deeper relationships, plant a garden in, get yourself in a more resilient state because there are hard times coming and they’ve already arrived at many parts of the world. They start at the outside, they move in. We’re seeing lots of those signs. So that’s what I’m going to be talking about back at Peak Prosperity aecom. Come on back. We’d love to have you there and just phenomenal conversations. So if this kind of data speaks to you, then I know where your tribe is hanging out and a lot of us are over at Peak Prosperity, so see you there. That’s all I have for today. We’ll see you next time. Bye bye.