ICAN previously reported that Dr. Barney Graham, Deputy Director of the Vaccine Research Center at Fauci’s agency – the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) within the NIH – stands to earn millions from sales of the Moderna vaccine.
There is a clear conflict between Dr. Graham’s personal financial interest and his role in developing safe and effective vaccines. So, in April 2020, ICAN submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for Dr. Graham’s emails regarding COVID-19. After the NIH failed to respond, ICAN sued the agency in federal court. The NIH is now producing documents to ICAN on a rolling basis.
ICAN recently received 292 pages of Dr. Graham’s emails. Unsurprisingly, many of the emails are heavily redacted, including an email between Dr. Graham and Moderna’s CEO, Stéphane Bancel! Why was this email redacted? Because NIH claims that it contains confidential commercial or financial information! In other words, the NIH thinks that Dr. Graham, who stands to earn millions from sales of the Moderna vaccine and who is simultaneously responsible for developing safe and effective vaccines, should be able to have confidential communications with Moderna’s CEO!
In another email from April 2020, the NIH redacted communications between Dr. Graham and Ralph Baric, a professor at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health with ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Why is this significant? Because the NIH recently admitted that taxpayer dollars were used to fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. According to Senator Rand Paul, this type of research “can lead to viruses that cause pandemics.” If there is even a remote possibility that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, could have leaked from the Wuhan lab, the government should not be able to hide any communications between its officials and scientists with ties to the Wuhan lab.
ICAN intends to challenge these inappropriate redactions and will continue to demand transparency from our federal health agencies – especially those poised to personally gain as a result of their government job.
