Anthony Fauci ran American health policy for two years and answered to no one.
Now a federal judge is demanding records the NIH has refused to release for five years.
What those documents show is why Fauci's agency fought this lawsuit every step of the way.
How NIH Pharma Royalty Payments Created a Direct Conflict of Interest
Every NIH scientist who helped develop a drug could collect royalty payments when a pharma company licensed that invention.
The pharma company paid royalties back to NIH – and NIH split those payments directly with the scientist who helped create the product.
The same scientist collecting those checks was often the one approving clinical trials, shaping treatment guidelines, and deciding which drugs received the full weight of federal promotion.
Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted this was a conflict of interest in 2005, telling the Associated Press that his own royalties were a problem – because his institute was simultaneously spending $36 million testing the same invention on patients.
Then the issue vanished from headlines for nearly two decades, the payments kept flowing, and nobody in Washington said a word.
Judicial Watch NIH Lawsuit Targets 59000 Redacted Fauci Payment Records
Judicial Watch filed a post-hearing brief in federal court this month, pressing U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta to force the NIH to release unredacted records showing exactly how much individual government scientists collected through the agency's "Inventor Award" royalty program.
The lawsuit – originally filed in October 2021 on behalf of Open the Books – has already extracted a damning number from the NIH.
Between 2010 and 2023, over $2.685 billion flowed from pharmaceutical companies and private entities to NIH institutes and scientists, with more than $1 billion of that total marked specifically for individual inventors.
The NIH redacted the individual payment amounts across all 59,000 transactions.
Fauci personally received at least 23 royalty payments during his tenure, with the NIH redacting the dollar amounts on every single one.
"As they say, follow the money," Judicial Watch told the court. "We want to see how much private companies pay federal health bureaucrats, but they're fighting back."
The NIH's defense has been that releasing individual payment amounts would let outsiders reverse-engineer the confidential royalty rates that private companies negotiated with the government.
That defense collapsed at the March evidentiary hearing.
Under cross-examination, the NIH's own expert witness admitted she had fabricated the numbers used in every example offered to justify the redactions – testifying that the figures were "all arbitrary numbers that I selected" and that she had no real-life royalty amounts to check her work against.
Judicial Watch called the back-calculate argument what it now provably is: a legal fiction constructed to keep the public in the dark.
RFK Jr Owns the Department Still Hiding Fauci's Payment Records
The lawsuit is putting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a corner he backed himself into.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton called out the Health and Human Services Secretary by name in the court filing.
"It is head-scratching that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would allow this stubborn and unlawful secrecy to continue about payments to Fauci and others," Fitton said.
Kennedy spent years demanding exactly this kind of disclosure from federal health agencies – and now his own department is the one blocking it.
Open the Books CEO John Hart framed what's actually at stake for the millions of Americans who took medical guidance from these same scientists.
"They are patients making some of life's most personal decisions when it comes to health care," Hart said. "They are entitled to understand all the financial stakes in play as they receive guidance from public health officials."
The pattern goes back further than the pandemic.
In 2005, the Associated Press cracked open the payment database and found 918 NIH scientists collecting pharma royalties. Congress made noise. NIH promised transparency. Then the payments quietly exploded – from $9 million across 918 scientists in 2005 to $710 million in just the two pandemic years alone.
The scientists who told you which vaccines were safe, which treatments were dangerous, and which doctors were spreading misinformation were collecting private checks from the same companies selling those vaccines.
Judge Mehta now has to decide whether the American people finally get to see every dollar.
Sources:
- Tom Fitton, "Judicial Watch Requests Court Order to Unseal NIH Royalty Payment Records," Judicial Watch, May 14, 2026.
- Tom Fitton, "Court Sets Evidentiary Hearing in Judicial Watch Lawsuit on NIH Royalty Payments," Judicial Watch, March 2026.
- Adam Andrzejewski, "Big Pharma Paid $690 Million to Fauci's Agency Through Secret Third-Party Royalties," Open the Books, June 2024.
- Mark Tapscott, "Drugmakers' Secret Royalty Payments to Fauci's NIAID Jumped After Pandemic," The Epoch Times, June 2024.
- Fox Business Staff, "Royalty Payments to Government Scientists Come Under Scrutiny," Fox Business, June 2022.
