Nominee Bertagnolli received over $350 million from Big Pharma
BATON ROUGE—U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy has once again proven he is out of touch with the people of Louisiana by voting to advance President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Dr. Monica Bertagnolli’s career reflects everything that is corruptive of America’s medical bureaucracies.
From the beginning, Bertagnolli has been underwritten by grants from the who’s who of Big Pharma: Pfizer, Seagen, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Takeda, Exelixis, Celgene, Novartis, Genetech and Millennium. These pharmaceutical companies have given her control of over $350 million in grants, endowing her with a personal salary and benefits package approaching $2 million.
As chair of the non-profit American Society of Clinical Oncology during the Trump Administration, she led the pushback against most favored nations status for the American people in drug pricing. Americans foot most of the bill for research and development of medicines yet pay some of the highest pharmaceutical prices in the world.
Bertagnolli served as an independent director at the Natera medical diagnostics company that specialized in prenatal tests for certain rare disorders. The New York Times exposed these tests as having an 85% failure rate. Given her medical and scientific expertise, it is difficult to understand, in her oversight capacity, why Bertagnolli would have let those tests go to market. She reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars in lucrative director’s fees and stock options on Natera and another biotech company, Leap. Bertagnolli left both boards when she accepted the position as head of the National Cancer Institute in 2022. Natera is a partner with the National Cancer Institute.
“Anyone endorsed by Anthony Fauci to replace him in his former role at the National Institutes of Health should be rejected outright. What should be required of the new Director is to review Fauci’s actions specifically in regard to illegal gain of function funding during the lead-up to the laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, that caused the COVID pandemic. Common sense would dictate that the candidates being considered should not have extensive ties to Big Pharma and the former director himself. Accountability and reform of one of our most preeminent health care agencies cannot happen with the heavy hand of those most responsible influencing that process. We call on Bill Cassidy to reverse his vote in committee when the nominee comes to the floor of the Senate and vote against this compromised candidate,” said Rep. Beryl Amedée, Secretary-Treasurer and founding member of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus.
