EXCERPT:
FAUCI: “Well, EcoHealth puts in — has grants that have nothing to do with what we’re talking about, that are looking at surveillance in different countries. And when they put a grant in, and there are administrative issues related to another grant, not the grants that are getting ready to be funded, and the administrative structure of the NIH, which is fundamentally an NIH central, gives a list of administrative things they need to address and they adequately address it. There is really no mechanism to say, arbitrarily, we can’t fund you, even though you have been peer-reviewed and highly recommended for funding, because someone doesn’t like you. I mean, if they ever brought that in court, they could sue us and win that in a microsecond. So you’ve got to be careful. It’s kind of like saying that there is a grant from an institution in the United States that’s something really bad about that grant and therefore you shouldn’t give any funding to any other element of that institution. You’ve got to be fair and you’ve got to go by process, not arbitrary deciding whether you want to fund something or not. You go by as an established NIH process. If something is peer-reviewed, gets a high recommendation for funding, you can’t arbitrarily decide, I just don’t want to fund it because people don’t like them.”