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.
The 56,000 transactions add up to more than $325 million, according to OpenTheBooks, though the individual amounts for each payment and corresponding license are not listed in the records.