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Trump Administration’s HHS chose that course. Subsequently, however, the Biden Administration restored unrestricted funding of abortion-derived fetal tissue research. HHS should:

• Promptly restore the ethics advisory committee to oversee abortionderived fetal tissue research, and Congress should prohibit such research altogether.

• End intramural research projects using tissue from aborted children within the NIH, which should end its human embryonic stem cell registry.

• Aggressively implement a plan to pursue and fund ethical alternative methods of research in order to ensure that abortion and embryodestructive related research, cell lines, and other testing methods become both fully obsolete and ethically unthinkable.

In addition, the Administration should reconvene a new National Council on Bioethics (NCB) to discuss new and emerging areas of ethical concern, to assess whether the ends justify the means when it comes to the promise of therapies and cures, and to establish what limiting principles should guide research and health policy. Because the male-female dyad is essential to human nature and because every child has a right to a mother and father, three-parent embryo creation and human cloning research should be banned. A new NCB should convene leading experts to examine these issues and provide policy recommendations for the new frontier of bioethical questions that our country will have to address in the coming years.

Finally, HHS should create and promote a research agenda that supports prolife policies and explores the harms, both mental and physical, that abortion has wrought on women and girls.

Conflicts of Interest. NIH maintains inappropriate industry ties that create serious conflicts of interest. In 2018, it was revealed that a $100 million NIH study on the benefits of moderate drinking was funded by the beer and liquor industry.” More recently, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci’s division of the NIH, owns half of the patent for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, among thousands of other pharma patents.”° Rather than providing grants to university-based investigators to run the clinical trials on their own Moderna vaccine, the NIH conducted this research internally—a clear conflict of interest. The NIAID will earn millions from this vaccine’s revenue with several NIH employees (and their heirs) personally receiving up to $150,000 annually from Moderna vaccine sales.”

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In May 2022, documents obtained pursuant to a FOIA request revealed that NIH Director Francis Collins, NAIAD Director Anthony Fauci, and Fauci’s Deputy Director, Clifford Lane, all received royalties from pharmaceutical companies between 2009 and 2014.” Nonprofit watchdog Open the Books estimates that from 2010 to 2020, third parties paid more than $350 million in royalties to NIH and its scientists, who are credited as coinventors. Most problematically, in the years when they received payments, Collins, Fauci, and Lane were NIH administrators, not researchers, with no plausible claim to be scientific co-discoverers.

Most of the world’s other advanced science countries have stricter prohibitions on such conflicts, which helps to explain why the most significant studies on COVID treatments, on natural immunity, and on vaccine efficacy have come mostly from outside the U.S.

Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken. Term limits should be imposed on top career leaders at the NIH, and Congress should consider block granting NIH’s grants budget to states to fund their own scientific research. Nothing in this system would prevent several states from partnering to co-fund large research projects that require greater resources or impact larger regions. Likewise, the establishment of funding for scientific research at the state level does not preclude more modest federal funding through the National Institutes of Health: The two models are not mutually exclusive.

The CDC and NIH Foundations, whose boards are populated with pharmaceutical company executives, need to be decommissioned. Private donations to these foundations—a majority of them from pharmaceutical companies—should not be permitted to influence government decisions about research funding or public health policy.

Woke Policies. Under Francis Collins, NIH became so focused on the #MeToo movement that it refused to sponsor scientific conferences unless there were a certain number of women panelists, which violates federal civil rights law against sex discrimination. This quota practice should be ended, and the NIH Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, which pushes such unlawful actions, should be abolished.

NIH has been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science. Instead, it should fund studies into the short-term and long-term negative effects of crosssex interventions, including “affirmation,” puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries, and the likelihood of desistence if young people are given counseling that does not include medical or social interventions.

CENTERS FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID SERVICES (CMS)

With the goal of being a societal safety net, Medicare and Medicaid touch more American lives than does any other federal program. While they help many, they