Principal investigator
 Principal investigator    | |
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In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial. The phrase is also often used as a synonym for "head of the laboratory" or "research group leader". While the expression is common in the sciences, it is used widely for the person or persons who make final decisions and supervise funding and expenditures on a given research project.[1]
In the context of United States federal funding from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the National Science Foundation (NSF), the PI is the person who takes direct responsibility for completion of a funded project, directing the research and reporting directly to the funding agency.[2]
NIAID’s lack of in-house drug development capacity allowed Dr. Fauci to build his new program by farming out drug research to a network of so-called “principal investigators,” or PIs, effectively controlled by pharmaceutical companies.
Today, when people refer to the “Medical Cartel,” they are principally speaking of pharmaceutical companies, hospital systems, HMOs and insurers, the medical journals, and public health regulators. But the glue that holds all these institutions together, and allows them to march in lockstep, is the army of PIs who act as lobbyists, spokespersons, liaisons, and enforcers.
Tony Fauci played a key historic role in elevating this cohort to dominate public health policy. PIs are powerful academic physicians and researchers who use federal grants and pharmaceutical industry contracts to build feudal empires at universities and research hospitals that mainly conduct clinical trials—a key stage in the licensing process— for new pharmaceutical products.
Thanks to NIH’s largesse, and to NIAID in particular, a relatively tiny network of PIs—a few hundred—determines the content and direction of virtually all America’s biomedical research. In 1987, some $4.6 billion of NIH’s $6.1 billion budget went to these off-campus researchers. By 1992, NIH’s budget had expanded to $8.9 billion, with $5 billion going to outside scientists at 1,300 universities, laboratories, and other elite institutions.
Today, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID alone controls $7.6 billion in annual discretionary expenditures that he distributes mainly to PIs around the globe. PIs are pharmaceutical industry surrogates who play key roles promoting the pharmaceutical paradigm and functioning as high priests of all its orthodoxies, which they proselytize with missionary zeal. They use their seats on medical boards and chairmanships of university departments to propagate dogma and root out heresy. They enforce message discipline, silence criticism, censor contrary opinions, and punish dissent. They populate the Data and Safety Monitoring Boards (DSMBs) that influence the design of clinical trial protocols and guide the interpretation of clinical trial outcomes and conclusions; the external advisory FDA panel, Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), that guides determination of whether new vaccines are “safe and effective” and merit licensure (marketing); and the CDC panel, The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), that essentially mandates vaccines to children.
They are the credentialed and trusted medical experts who prognosticate on television networks—now helplessly reliant on pharmaceutical ad revenue—to push out Pharma content. These “experts”—Paul Offit, Peter Hotez, Stanley Plotkin, Ian Lipkin, William Schaffner, Kathleen Edwards, Arthur Caplan, Stanley Katz, Greg Poland, and Andrew Pollard—appear between Pharma ads on network and cable news shows to promote the annual flu shots and measles scares, to drum up fears about COVID, and to rail against “anti-vaxxers.”
They write the steady stream of editorials that appear in local and national newspapers to reinforce the hackneyed orthodoxies of the pharmaceutical paradigms—“all vaccines are safe and effective,” etc. They root out heresy by sitting on the state medical boards—the “Inquisition” courts—that censure and de-license dissident doctors. They control the medical journals and peer-review journal literature to fortify Pharma’s agenda. They teach on medical school faculties, populate journal editorial boards, and chair university departments. They supervise hospitals and chair hospital departments. They act as expert witnesses for pharmaceutical companies in civil court and the federal vaccine court. They present awards to one another.
The 2006 meeting of CDC’s ACIP provides an illustrative blueprint for how Tony Fauci and his Pharma partners use their PIs to control the key FDA and CDC panels that license and “recommend” new vaccines for addition to the childhood schedule.
That 2006 ACIP panel recommended two new blockbuster Merck shots: the Gardasil HPV vaccine for all girls ages nine through twenty-six, and three doses of a Merck rotavirus vaccine, Rotateq, for infants at ages two, four, and six months. Both Bill Gates and Tony Fauci (via NIAID) had provided seed and clinical trial funding for the development of both Gardasil and the rotavirus vaccine. Merck maintained it had not tested either vaccine against an inert placebo in pre-approval trials, so no one could scientifically predict if the vaccines would avert more injuries or cancers than they would cause.
Nevertheless, the sister FDA panel, VRBPAC, approved Gardasil—to prevent cervical cancer—without requiring proof that the vaccine prevented any sort of cancer, and despite strong evidence from Merck’s clinical trial that Gardasil could dramatically raise risks of cancer and autoimmunity in some girls. ACIP, nevertheless, effectively mandated both jabs. Gardasil would be the most expensive vaccine in history, costing patients $420 for the three-jab series and generating revenues of over $1 billion annually for Merck.
That year, nine of the thirteen ACIP panel members and their institutions collectively received over $1.6 billion of grant money from NIH and NIAID. Systemic Conflicts of Interest Pharma and Dr. Fauci similarly rig virtually all the critical drug approval panels using this strategy of populating them with PIs who, bound by financial fealty to Pharma and NIAID funders, reliably approve virtually every new drug upon which they deliberate—with or without safety studies.
From 1999 to 2000, Government Oversight Committee (GOC) Chairman Republican Congressman Dan Burton investigated the systemic corruption of these panels during two years of intense investigations and hearings. According to Burton, “CDC routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on influential advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines . . . while these same scientists have financial ties, academic affiliations and other . . . interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight.”[3]
