Rand Paul demands Fauci, NIH scientists disclose pharmaceutical royalties

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., wants federal employees to disclose royalties they receive from new innovations, an issue he says he's been "concerned about for years."

"During COVID, we had vaccines that were developed by Pfizer and Moderna. And then these vaccines were mandated on people throughout government, throughout the military, by different governors around the country, and yet, we don't know whether the people that were approving either the vaccines or the mandates were receiving money from big Pharma," Paul told Fox News Digital in an interview Thursday. 

Paul's bill, the Royalty Transparency Act of 2024, unanimously passed in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee markup on Wednesday.

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Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., left, and Dr. Anthony Fauci (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images | AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

If passed, it would require that royalties paid out to federal employees be made public on their financial disclosures for anyone to view in an online database. 

"This is something that I inquired when I had [Dr.] Anthony Fauci in our committee," Paul said. "I'd said, you know, we need to know this, this is a basic conflict of interest problem, and he basically thumbed his nose at the American people." Fauci is the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and former chief medical adviser to the president.

Paul said the bill will allow people "to know whether or not any of the people" approving drugs are "receiving money from the same companies that manufacture the vaccines."

For decades, there's been controversy surrounding the transparency of National Institutes of Health (NIH) royalty payouts because they have refused to disclose how much its researchers are getting paid. 

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NIH scientists have reportedly received $400 million in royalty payouts from third-party companies for medical inventions they produced. Some were even found to be linked to foreign entities, including the Chinese Communist Party.

Last summer, the government watchdog group OpenTheBooks found that more than 1,800 government scientists collected 27,244 royalty payments totaling hundreds of millions of dollars from 2009 to 2016. 

It's not the first time that royalty payments have come under scrutiny. In 2005, an Associated Press investigation laid bare the potential conflict of interest arising when a government employee works on clinical trials for a product while simultaneously receiving royalty payments for it. 

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After that report, the NIH promised that scientists would fully disclose the payments to patients, but some lawmakers are now pushing for more transparency. 

"So, it's not a small amount of money," Paul said. "It's a significant amount of money … to scientists, and so some of them are getting million-dollar paydays from big pharmacy companies, and it's not being disclosed to the public."

Paul's bill would need to pass the full Senate and the House of Representatives and be signed by the president before it becomes law. 

Fox News Digital has reached out to the NIH and Fauci for comment but did not hear back at press time.

Fox News' Paul Best contributed to this report.