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Whistleblower: millions of dollars set aside to develop drugs and vaccines were misused by Health and Human Services
Since at least 2010, millions of dollars set aside to develop drugs and vaccines for a public health crisis were misused by Health and Human Services Department staff. A whistleblower complaint triggered a federal investigation into the HHS office that oversees vaccine research. Investigators found that funds were improperly spent on salaries, administrative expenses and office redecoration.
Federal officials repeatedly raided a fund earmarked for biomedical research in the years leading up to the covid-19 pandemic, spending millions of dollars on unrelated salaries, administrative expenses and even the cost of removing office furniture, according to the findings of an investigation into a whistleblower complaint shared with The Washington Post.
The investigation, conducted by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services and overseen by the Office of Special Counsel, centered on hundreds of millions of dollars intended for the development of vaccines, drugs and therapies by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority or BARDA, an arm of the federal health department.
The unidentified whistleblower alleged that officials in the office of the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, which oversaw the biomedical agency, wrongly dipped into the money set aside by Congress for development of lifesaving medicines, beginning in fiscal 2010 and continuing through at least fiscal 2019, spanning both the Obama and Trump administrations.
Why do we even have a government agency to develop vaccines ? Private industry is much better, faster and fiscally responsible.
The agency provides funding to the private sector for research.
A lot of these things no private sector company is going to invest billions in, just to have the high probability of it not working, or the end product being too expensive.
The gov has a vested interest in tackling health issues, thus provides funding, the same it provides funding to defense contractors to research weapon systems.
There are a lot of medical products that are very good for society as a whole that are not necessarily ever going to be very profitable, and vaccines are at the top of that list. So the government puts their finger on the scale because the positive externalities/public good from, say, developing a HPV vaccine is very high even when the private sector would get far more in profits from treating cervical cancer at X number of cases a year than they would from developing a vaccine for HPV that will reduce the number of cervical cancer cases by 95% if the vaccine is widely administered.
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