The entire public health system is a “target-rich environment for waste, fraud, corruption and taxpayer abuse,” Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.com, said during an interview with comedian and political commentator Russell Brand.
Andrzejewski founded the government spending watchdog organization when, after he wrote an investigative piece on Dr. Anthony Fauci, Forbes terminated the column he wrote for eight years. Last year, Open The Books filed 50,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. According to Andrzejewski, those FOIA requests revealed, among other things, that “NIH, the National Institutes of Health, is actually a revolving door.”
Each year the NIH awards about $32 billion in grants to 54,000 healthcare entities — including pharmaceutical companies, universities and research organizations. Open The Books found that over the past 12 years, $1.4 billion worth of those grants went back to NIH leadership and 2,400 NIH scientists in secret “third-party royalties” — royalties paid by pharmaceutical companies back to the NIH or its scientists who are credited as co-inventors of pharmaceutical products.