ICAN previously reported that some government officials stand to earn millions from the sale of mRNA-1273, the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), and Moderna.
Given the clear conflict between these officials’ personal interest in making money and their duty to ensure vaccines are safe, ICAN, through its attorneys, submitted a number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIAID’s parent agency. One of those requests was for the Deputy Director of NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center, Barney Graham’s, emails regarding COVID-19. When NIH failed to respond to those requests, ICAN sued the agency in federal court. In response to that lawsuit, NIH agreed to produce responsive documents on a rolling basis.
ICAN recently received three productions of Barney Graham’s emails. NIH redacted many of these documents including exchanges involved Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett, both of whom are NIH officials that stand to earn millions from the Moderna vaccine. The excuse? NIH claims they “contain staff advice, opinion, and recommendations…” and that other redacted documents contain “trade secrets and commercial or financial information that is privileged and confidential.”
When taxpayer money is being used to develop this vaccine, nothing should be a secret from the public. Certainly not communications between public officials that stand to personally earn millions of dollars from the sale of this vaccine and are using taxpayer money to develop the vaccine!
ICAN does not believe the same government officials who stand to profit from the vaccine should be able to hide their “advice, opinion and recommendations” regarding same or to argue that their emails are “confidential.” We will challenge the agency’s inappropriate redactions to make sure that these government officials are transparent even if it hurts their pocketbooks.
