Lack of oversight?
Dr. McKinney said the NIH, as well as universities and hospitals, had a long and trusting relationship with China and should not be blamed for falling prey to the Chinese government’s concerted effort to steal intellectual property.
But some government watchdog groups have chided the NIH for lax oversight. In February 2019, the federal Health & Human Services’ Office of Inspector General found that “NIH has not assessed the risks to national security when permitting data access to foreign [principal investigators].”
Federal investigators have said that Thousand Talents has been one of the biggest threats.
The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations reported in November 2019 that “the federal government’s grant-making agencies did little to prevent this from happening, nor did the FBI and other federal agencies develop a coordinated response to mitigate the threat.”
The NIH invests $31 billion a year in medical research through 50,000 competitive grants to more than 300,000 researchers, according to that report. Even after uncovering grant fraud and peer-review manipulation that benefited China, “significant gaps in NIH’s grant integrity process remain,” the report states. Site visits by the NIH’s Division of Grants Compliance and Oversight dropped from 28 in 2012 to just 3 in 2018, the report noted.
Widening dragnet
In April 2019, Science reported that the NIH identified five researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who had failed to disclose their ties to Chinese enterprises and who had failed to keep peer review confidential.
Two resigned before they could be fired, one was fired, another eventually left the institution, and the fifth was found to have not willfully engaged in subterfuge.
Just a month later, Emory University in Atlanta announced that it had fired a husband and wife research team. The neuroscientists were known for their studies of Huntington disease. Both were U.S. citizens and had worked at Emory for more than 2 decades, according to the Science report.
The Moffitt situation led to the Florida legislature’s investigation, and also prompted some soul searching. The Tampa Bay Times reported that U.S. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) asked state universities to provide information on what they are doing to stop foreign influence. The University of Florida then acknowledged that four faculty members resigned or were terminated because of ties to a foreign recruitment program.
This article first appeared on Medscape.com.