Senator Rand Paul has introduced a bill to supposedly rein in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). It is, unfortunately, little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It would split NIAID into three, with term-limited and Senate- confirmed directors. This sounds suspiciously like the creation of the Department of Homeland (in)Security after 9/11. Various agencies and bureaus were put under a new head, and after an extended gestation, out popped Alejandro Majorkas.

This time, Anthony Fauci has passed his sell-by date, and now, after the damage has been done, for the umpteenth time (at a minimum Ebola, Zika, AIDS, SARS, SARS CoV2, brutal suppression of dissent… sorry, I have to come up for air), there is a Senate bill that doesn’t address the real problem. I’m aware the politics is the art of the possible, but sometimes you have to simply blow things up. Or burn the place down. Choose your favorite figure of speech.

The National Institutes of Health are no such thing. There are twenty-seven distinct organizations within NIH, spending a total of about $42 billion. Some sound very good, like the National Cancer Institute (NCI). But one has to ask if the NCI helps or hurts. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) is another that sounds good, but here we know there are problems. We’ve been fed the lie that statins are great for us, even though they cause a wide range of side effects. Further, there’s little evidence that they have any benefit except in a very limited range of cases. And NHLBI hasn’t bothered to point out that the high-carbohydrate diet promoted by the Department of Agriculture is the ultimate cause of Type II Diabetes, the largest single killer disease in America.

Of course the government is there to help us. Or not. We cannot avoid the fact that the lockdowns promoted by Fauci killed millions of people, and the campaign to vilify Ivermectin did as well. So one has to ask what good the NIH actually does. And at this point, we have to observe Sutton’s Law: Follow the money.

NIH provides on the order of half of all the research grant money in the U.S. If your proposed project doesn’t align with the orthodoxy at NIH, you can kiss your funding goodbye. And when the elephant in the room throws its weight around, precious little that the NIH dislikes gets funded. That means that innovation is verboten. You can follow the party line and do studies that rarely result in truly new information, or you can try to do them on a shoestring. We all know how far a shoestring stretches.

Reorganization will not address the fundamental flaw underlying the NIH. It is a bureaucratic nightmare that exists to perpetuate itself. The odd possibility that some good comes from it will be far outweighed by the bad. Remdesivir is a good example. Fauci’s shop developed it as a treatment for Ebola, but it failed. When COVID-19 arrived, it was promoted as the miracle cure after it shortened hospital length of stay. But that ignored the fact that the same studies failed to prove that it had any effect on mortality. And it’s toxic to the liver and kidneys. But remdesivir is very healthy for Fauci’s pocket, so it continues to be pushed.

We can’t let the FDA off the hook here, even though this body isn’t directly controlled by NIH. It granted emergency use authorization for vaccines that we now know are harmful, and for which an elementary statistical analysis would have uncovered major fraud. Of course, they are the authors of that famous “You are not a horse…” tweet that dissed ivermectin. And they certainly had a voice in the campaign to destroy any doctor who was willing to follow the evidence and prescribe ivermectin.

Ronald Reagan didn’t realize how right he was when he said the worst words in the English language were, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” The NIH and FDA are two of the worst culprits in the constellation, with the IRS being only slightly worse. So what can be done?

The answer is, surprisingly, quite simple. Regular order in the House requires each Cabinet level department to be funded individually. This presents a serious opportunity. In funding the Department of Health and Human Services, the House could simply fund various sub-agencies as line items. And the NIH line could simply be omitted. The Senate would probably try to add it back in, but with a bit of fortitude, the House could hold out. Even if it didn’t get the whole loaf, it could remove the authority for any agency in NIH to fund outside research. This would obviously stop shenanigans like that money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology by way of the EcoHealth Alliance. And it would stop the massive funding of a “scientific” echo chamber. Private funders would look for projects that would actually add knowledge, usually in order to create benefits that would repay their investments.

Meanwhile, “research” that benefits bureaucrats would be severely limited. We need actual research that benefits America.

Ted Noel M.D. is a retired Anesthesiologist/Intensivist who podcasts and posts on social media (even restored on Twitter!) as DoctorTed and @vidzette.His DoctorTed podcasts are available on many podcast channels.

Image: NIAID