Tag: National Institutes of Health

Commentary: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Will Rebuild Trust in Public Health

RealClearWire
Jay Bhattacharya

Just weeks before President-elect Trump announced that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya would be his nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Bhattacharya and I were together at Stanford University for a bold, first-of-its-kind symposium on public health decision making during the COVID-19 crisis. The idea behind the symposium was to shatter the public health echo chamber and bring diverse perspectives together in respectful dialogue. Dr. Bhattacharya and I are close friends, but our backgrounds are quite different. He is firmly at home at Stanford, having gone there as an undergraduate, and then going on to get a medical degree and a Ph.D. there before joining the faculty as a Professor of Health Policy. I, on the other hand, am a blue-collar Midwesterner who enlisted the in U.S. Navy after high school. I carry no titles of academic distinction and was likely the only participant at the symposium without a medical degree or PhD.

Yet, I was invited by Stanford to moderate the symposium’s opening panel with seven leading public health authorities from top institutions across the world. What brought me into this unusual position was my expanding work to rebuild truth and trust in public health—a collaboration that began with former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and the Braver Angels organization, which is nation’s largest movement working to bridge the partisan divide.

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NIH Official Says He Won’t Get COVID Boosters, Admits Shots Are Ineffective; Not Worth the Risk of Heart Damage

American Greatness
Vaccine Shot

A public health official at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was caught on hidden camera admitting that the COVID shots are not terribly effective and not worth the risk of heart damage in people under 30.

None of the assertions made by Raja Cholan, Chief of the Health Data Standards Branch at the U.S. National Library of Medicine, would come as a surprise to Americans who distrusted the legacy media narratives during the COVID pandemic and turned to to alternative sources of news such as The Defender, Epoch Times, Alex Berenson’s Unreported News, Steve Kirsch’s Newsletter, Open VAERS, Vigilant News, and American Greatness, among many others. Still, it is striking to see a current NIH official corroborating our reporting on the faulty products even as the Biden regime continues to push them.

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Acclaimed Medical Center Appears to Bury Data Undermining COVID-Heart Risk Study

Just the News
COVID Vaccine

With federal authorities recognizing the plunge in COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness as early as four months after each jab, which may actually increase the risk of subsequent infection, the public health establishment is trying to rekindle Americans’ interest in a so-called layered mitigation strategy to keep COVID infections at bay.

While it leans into one-size-fits-all vaccination as the best way to avoid severe outcomes from an increasingly mild virus with near-total natural immunity nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends wearing any kind of mask and social distancing as an “additional prevention strategy.” 

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House Republicans Raise Alarm over China’s Potential Use of U.S. Funds in Military Research

Just the News
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers

House Republicans are urging the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s nonpartisan watchdog, to investigate what safeguards the National Institutes of Health has in place to ensure China does not use research funds to bolster its military or unethically use humans in research studies.

“Recent reports have raised concerns about the NIH’s ability to screen for national security issues,” the Republicans, led by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Wa., wrote in a letter Tuesday to Government Accountability Office Comptroller Gene Dodaro.

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Biden Admin Shells Out $200,000 for Research on App to Teach Men How to Sound Like Women

Virginia Star Staff
Learning

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) approved a research grant in November for over $200,000 to create an app that helps men who identify as transgender sound like women.

The grant, first reported by The College Fix, was approved in November 2023 by the NIH’s Deafness and Other Communication Disorders department and will be run by Vesna Dominika Novak, a transgender associate professor at the University of Cincinnati. The NIH approved $213,878 in funding from December 2023 to November 2024 so Novak’s team can create a smartphone app to train biological males who identify as transgender “women” to speak like women, according to the project details.

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Federal Secrets Spill on COVID Origins amid Rodent Research on Risks of Lab Mods, Vax in Pregnancy

Just the News

The National Institutes of Health appears to be struggling to hide its dirty laundry on COVID-19 origins against a rash of leaks, congressional probes, and Freedom of Information Act requests, even when officials are determined to thwart sunlight.

The ongoing exposure of their communications and actions isn’t the only thing likely worrying federal scientists. 

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Federal Diversity Trainings Cost Taxpayers in 2023 Millions of Dollars

Virginia Star Staff

The Biden administration spent millions on diversity trainings for federal agencies, including some for the armed forces, in 2023.

Taxpayers were on the hook for the more than $16.3 million the federal government spent on diversity trainings taking place in 2023, according to a government spending database. Past government diversity trainings have instructed federal workers that asking an Asian colleague for help with a math problem could be racist, that men can become pregnant and that “social pain” can be the same as physical pain.

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‘Legal’ Concerns Halt NIH $154 Million ‘False Information’ Program

Virginia Star Staff

The National Institutes of Health halted a $154 million research program intended to study “equitable health communication” and combat alleged medical misinformation.

The “pause” came “in the context of the current regulatory and legal landscape around communication platforms,” according to a website for the initiative.

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Fauci, Collins Received 58 Royalty Payments as NIH Collected $325 Million from Companies: Records

Just the News

Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, the longtime directors of the National Institutes of Health and its National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases respectively, personally received 58 royalty payments from companies to license their inventions developed with taxpayer money, newly disclosed records reveal.

Transparency watchdog OpenTheBooks.com on Wednesday published more than 1,500 pages of unredacted records identifying which companies paid which NIH scientists for which inventions and when, following a mostly successful Freedom of Information Act battle with NIH.

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Commentary: Presidential Dr. Fauci Still on a Roll

Virginia Star Staff

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who allegedly retired in January, still receives a limo driver and security team of U.S. Marshals, documents obtained by Fox News through a FOIA request reveal. “The only retired official I know of that gets this kind of treatment is a former president,” said Sen. Rand Paul. “I have no idea why this bureaucrat still has a limo driver security detail.”

Maybe it’s because, as Joe Biden once quipped, Dr. Fauci is the real president. Now comes word that many of his actions as NIAID boss were illegitimate.

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NIH Renews Grant to Organization That Funded Coronavirus Experiments in Wuhan

Just the News

The National Institutes of Health have renewed a grant to EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that funded experiments in Wuhan at a facility identified as the possible origin point of the COVID-19 pandemic.

EcoHealth announced the renewal on Monday, noting that the grant had been suspended in April of 2020 “due to concerns about continuing collaborative laboratory research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” EcoHealth’s experiments involved on-site work at the WIV and involved the study of coronaviruses.

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Moderna Under Fire as CEO Earned Nearly $400 Million in Stock Options and a 50 Percent Raise Last Year

Just the News

Moderna is under fire after financial records showed the biotech company’s CEO Stephane Bancel earned around $393 million in 2022 from stock options he exercised as he received a 50% raise.

Bancel, whose firm is known for producing the COVID-19 vaccine, received $1.5 million in 2022, an increase of 50% from 2021, and Moderna increased his target cash bonus, a March securities and exchange commission filing shows.

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NIH Gives $2.2 Billion to Foreign Animal Testing Labs That Lack Oversight

RealClearWire

There are disturbing gaps in oversight at overseas labs that use animals in experiments. Labs to which the National Institutes of Health has given $2.2 billion in contracts and grants from 2011 to 2021, according to a recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

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Feds Create Race, Gender Speech Codes for Scientists to Direct Report Language

The Center Square

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal and science technology office, has made race and gender speech codes for its scientists a top priority.

The guidance, for example, tells federal employees not to use the words “blacklist” or “whitelist” because of the racial connotations and also cautions against “using terms that assign a gender to inanimate objects, such as male/female connectors.”

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‘Unacceptable Incompetence’: CDC Made Dozens of Basic Data Errors on COVID, Epidemiologists Find

Just the News
Sick person talking to CDC employee

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found itself hoist with its own petard by making 25 basic statistical and numerical errors related to COVID-19, particularly with regard to children, while purporting to expose COVID vaccine misinformation, according to an analysis led by University of California San Francisco epidemiologists.

The preprint, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, documented 20 errors that “exaggerated the severity of the COVID-19 situation” and three that “simultaneously exaggerated and downplayed” severity, while one each was neutral or exaggerated vaccine risks.

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Taxpayer-Funded Study Concluding Teens on Puberty Blockers, Cross-Sex Hormones Have Improved Mental Health Draws Fire

Susan Berry, PhD

A taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) study that drew the conclusion that teens who receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have greater life satisfaction has come under fire. The study, published at the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), states researchers from the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago sought to investigate the psychosocial functioning of 315 transgender and nonbinary young people, aged 12-20 years, over a period of two years after “gender-affirming hormones” (GAH), i.e., testosterone or estradiol, had been administered for gender dysphoria.

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Nation Health Agency Spends Millions on Equity, LGBT Issues Instead of Researching Cures

The Center Square

Congress’ recent $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill increased the budget for medical research funding at the National Institutes of Health to nearly $50 billion in 2023 alone. A closer look at the agency reveals that NIH is increasingly spending its time, and funds, on equity and LGBT issues as well as “systemic racism and inequities.”

The National Institutes of Health has devoted millions of taxpayer dollars toward these kinds of issues for their research, taxpayer money that did not go to the federal health agency’s primary research goal of finding cures and medical treatments.

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Feds Pay Nearly $1.2 Million to Study If Racism Causes Poor Sleep

The Center Square

The National Institutes of Health has issued more than a million dollars via taxpayer-funded medical research grants to find evidence that racism is to blame for poor sleep in minority communities.

The funding was appropriated to Dr. Alexander Tsai, an associate professor at Harvard University who is conducting the research through Massachusetts General Hospital, where he works as a psychiatrist.

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NIH-Funded Clinical Trials Failed to Comply with Federal Reporting Rule, Watchdog

Virginia Star Staff

The National Institutes of Health failed to insure that all clinical trials funded by the agency and required to be reported in 2019 and 2020 met federal requirements, according to an inspector general report released Tuesday.

The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General reviewed a total of 72 such trials from that period and found results were never submitted in 25, late in 12 and on time in 35.

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Kentucky Senator Rand Paul Leads First Congressional Hearing on Gain-of-Function Research

Susan Berry, PhD

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) begins the first congressional hearing on gain-of-function research Wednesday, attempting to determine whether the National Institutes of Health (NIH) used taxpayer funds for gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Before we even get to whether the virus came from a lab we have to explore were they doing gain of function research?” Paul told Fox News’ Brett Baier Tuesday.

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Anthony Fauci: Vaccine Committee Members Receiving Royalties from Drug Companies ‘Not Required to Divulge Them’

Susan Berry, PhD

During a Senate health committee hearing Thursday that focused on the U.S. response to the COVID pandemic, White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) that members of vaccine committees who ultimately decide on whether vaccines should be approved for use “are not required to divulge” whether they receive royalties from the drug companies who manufacture them.

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Royalty Payments to Government Scientists Facing Scrutiny

Admin

A government watchdog has discovered that over 1,800 government scientists received 27,244 royalty payments from 2009 to 2016, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in a seven-year time span.

Fox News reports that the findings were the result of a lawsuit filed against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by OpenTheBooks.com. The watchdog had sued the NIH after the agency allegedly stonewalled their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. As a result, the NIH agreed to share their bookkeeping on royalties, although they redacted the total amount of individual payments, as well as the inventions, and the third parties who actually paid the royalties.

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NIH Study: Vaccinated People Develop Fewer Antibodies Than Unvaccinated After COVID Infection

Admin

Unvaccinated people develop much broader antibody immunity after being infected with COVID than people who have received the mRNA shots do, according to an NIH study. And the gap was large whether subjects had mild, moderate, or severe COVID infections.

The results of the study, which were highlighted by Alex Berenson on his Unreported Truths Substack, Daniel Horowitz at the Blaze, and Igor Chudov on his Substack newsletter, completely destroy the regime narrative that the shots provide stronger immunity than a natural infection, and may help explain why so many vaccinated Americans are now suffering from multiple COVID infections.

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NIH Director Confirms Agency Hid COVID Genes on Orders from the Chinese

Virginia Star Staff

On Wednesday, Lawrence Tabak, the acting director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), confirmed during congressional testimony that officials at the NIH deliberately withheld crucial information about early genomic sequences of the COVID-19 virus on the orders of Chinese scientists.

As reported by the New York Post, Tabak told the House Appropriations subcommittee that the agency “eliminated from public view” all the data from the location of the virus’s origin, Wuhan, while adding that researchers can still access the information through a “tape drive.”

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NIH, Agency Scientists Received Estimated $350 Million in Royalty Payments over Last Decade: Report

Virginia Star Staff

The National Institutes of Health and its scientists received an estimated $350 million in royalties from third-party payers between 2010 and 2020, according to an investigation by government transparency watchdog Open the Books.

The third-party payers are, according to the report, mostly pharmaceutical companies that credit NIH scientists as coinventors on various patents.

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Biden’s NIH May Have Colluded with University of Pittsburgh to Downplay Experiments on Babies

Virginia Star Staff

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) appears to have colluded with the University of Pittsburgh (UP) to dispel public outrage over its research on human fetal remains, including those obtained through abortions, according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Dr. Jeremy Berg, associate senior vice chancellor for science strategy and planning in the health sciences at UP, asked then-director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Francis Collins for help in combatting negative media coverage in October 2021 after its experiments on human fetal remains were made public through a FOIA request. The NIH then arranged a meeting with UP to discuss the matter, emails revealed.

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Biden Appoints Former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins to Serve as Top Science Advisor

Susan Berry, PhD

President Joe Biden has tapped former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins to serve as his top science advisor, several months after allegations that Collins and White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci were untruthful in their assertions that NIH did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China.

Biden announced Wednesday Collins will serve as Science Advisor to the President and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology “until permanent leadership is nominated and confirmed.”

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Federal Study Pays Minors to Report Sexual Behavior Without Permission from Parents

Virginia Star Staff

A federal study asks underage boys to report their sexual behavior to a mobile app in exchange for up to $275 all without requiring permission from their parents, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

Researchers at Columbia University funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have spent more than eight million dollars of taxpayer money on a study that pays gay and transgender minors as young as 13 to track their sexual behavior on an app called MyPEEPS without parental permission, the Free Beacon reported. Questions such as whether or not they have “condomless anal sex” are asked as part of the study.

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In Email to Fauci, National Institutes of Health Director Collins Asked for Media Hit Piece to Smear ‘Fringe’ Harvard, Stanford, Oxford Epidemiologists

Virginia Star Staff

Last fall, outgoing National Institutes of Health Director (NIH) Francis Collins asked Dr. Anthony Fauci in an email to pursue a “quick and devastating” media hit piece to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration, recently released emails show.

More than 60,000 infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists signed the declaration to express their “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.”

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Rand Paul: ‘Fauci Should Go to Prison for Five Years for Lying to Congress’

Admin

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) on Thursday said he thinks Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, should go to prison for five years for lying to Congress. The Kentucky senator has repeatedly sparred with the NIAID director over the funding of gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab.

“Fauci should go to prison for five years for lying to Congress. They’ve prosecuted other people, they’ve selectively gone after Republicans, but in no way will they do anything about him lying,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business.

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Top GOP Lawmakers Pledge to Hold Fauci Accountable on Wuhan Gain-of-Function Research

Virginia Star Staff

Leading Republican lawmakers from both the House and the Senate pledged to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci and the National Institutes of Health accountable following a Daily Caller News Foundation report on documents showing the agency had concerns about funding gain-of-function research in China in 2016.

The documents, obtained by the White Coat Waste Project and provided exclusively to the DCNF, show that two subordinates of Fauci reached out to the nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance in May 2016 with concerns the group was planning to engage in gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, only to drop the issue after EcoHealth downplayed their concerns.

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National Institutes of Health Director to Step Down by Year’s End

Virginia Star Staff

The longtime Director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, announced on Tuesday that he will be stepping down from his position by the end of 2021, CNN reports.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Collins called it “an incredible privilege to lead this great agency for more than a decade.”

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Fauci’s Agency Dumped Millions into Chinese Entities to Study Infectious Diseases Since 2012, Federal Data Shows

Virginia Star Staff

The National Institutes of Health has doled out nearly $46 million in taxpayer funds to 100 Chinese institutions in the form of subgrants since the 2012 fiscal year to conduct research into infectious diseases, drug addiction, mental health and other scientific fields, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of federal spending data.

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US Grant to Wuhan Lab to Enhance Bat-Based Coronaviruses Was Never Scrutinized by HHS Review Board, NIH Says

Admin

An oversight board created to scrutinize research that would enhance highly dangerous pathogens did not review a National Institutes of Health grant that funded a lab in Wuhan, China, to genetically modify bat-based coronaviruses.

Experts say the NIH grant describes scientists conducting gain-of-function research, a risky area of study that, in this case, made SARS-like viruses even more contagious. Federal funding for gain-of-function research was temporarily suspended in 2014 due to widespread scientific concerns it risked leaking supercharged viruses into the human population.

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GOP Lawmakers Demand Investigation into National Institutes of Health’s Relationship with Wuhan Lab

Virginia Star Staff

Dozens of Republican members of Congress wrote a letter to National Institutes of Health Acting Inspector General Christi Grimm on Tuesday demanding a “prompt and thorough investigation” into the NIH’s relationship with a Chinese lab that studied coronaviruses.

The 28 lawmakers demanded Grimm investigate the total amount of funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has received from the NIH, as well as whether any NIH officials communicated with the lab or its U.S. sponsor at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to quell debate surrounding the theory that the virus could have accidentally escaped from the lab.

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Former Ohio State University Researcher Lies About Grant Applications, Uses Funds to Develop Medicine for China

Virginia Star Staff

Song Guo Zheng, a former researcher at Ohio State University and Penn State University, pleaded guilty to using millions in federal grants to increase medical expertise for China.

Zheng — a professor who led an autoimmune research team for both universities — received $4.1 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health for research projects. Instead of using the funds to benefit the United States, he developed China’s expertise in immunology, according to the Department of Justice.

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Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine 94.5 Percent Effective in Phase Three Study

The Center Square

Biotech company Moderna announced Monday that its new COVID-19 vaccine has proven to be 94.5 % effective.

The company said it intends to submit for an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the coming weeks and expects the EUA to be based on the final analysis of 151 cases and a median follow-up of more than two months.

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