Have you ever considered the recent years’ tsunami of
research that emphasizes the dangers of e-cigarette and vaping products? Was this work spontaneously generated? How was it funded?
Philip Cole, Elizabeth Delzell and I answered these
questions in a manuscript published in 2000 in the journal Epidemiology
(available here). We described how after World War II,
universities “changed their mission and became research arms of the federal
government…But, with considerable money comes influence and eventually some
control. The funds had been flowing for little more than a decade when
President Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address to the nation, warned
universities against accepting encumbered federal funds. He saw that the giving
hand already had become the heavy hand. One by one, ever more onerous conditions
were attached to federal awards. This has continued to the point that many
universities now harbor research programs, sometimes entire institutes, that
function essentially as satellites of the federal government.”
The U.S. National Institutes of Health is the primary
funding source for researchers at universities countrywide. In 2018, NIH provided 54,000 awards to 2,900
institutions -- nearly $40 billion in all.
Research awards have two components. The first is “direct costs,” which covers
actual research. These funds are managed
by the researchers and include salaries for faculty and staff, equipment and
other necessary expenses.
The second component is “indirect costs,” covering things
not directly related to the research – items like buildings, utilities and
administrative expenses. These items are
managed by university administrators.
For every $100 in direct costs that a researcher gets from the NIH for their
project, university administrators take $55-70 for indirect costs. That is why we wrote that “…the need [for
indirect costs] is so great that, perversely, Moneychangers [i.e.,
administrators] now prefer encumbered research grants, which offset overhead
costs, to unencumbered gifts which do not but which do give faculty members
freedom to pursue their interests.”
When Uncle Sam gives universities money, there’s always a
catch, which we described in our article: “Federal bureaucrats fuel the fires
of growth by urging academics to do research consistent with their agency’s
mission. Through master agreements, cooperative agreements, requests for
proposals and inducements of every sort, professors are led into doing the
government’s research.”
It gets worse. Money
is so scarce that “Many universities now are over committed to…the aggrandizement
of research, and some have gone so far that research fundraising has become
more important than research itself.”
This brings us to tobacco research. As I have noted, the government’s stated
mission is “to create a
world free of tobacco use.” In
fiscal year 2020, the NIH disbursed 1,489 awards identifying the key word
“tobacco” to 303 unique organizations.
The grants totaled $693 million.
Over one-quarter of this money ($186 million) was devoted to research on
e-cigarettes and vaping products. Note
in the following chart how increases in this funding have driven the number of
research publications.
In summary, NIH is the most critical source of support for
all American researchers, universities and other academic institutions. Researchers and administrators recognize the
value, if not imperative, of comporting with the government’s tobacco-termination
mission. Despite this oppressive
influence, researchers routinely declare that they have no conflicts of
interest or bias.
The steady flow of research reports demonizing e-cigarettes
and vapor products provides “scientific” evidence to support harsh regulation. The Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory
Committee (TPSAC) that advises the FDA on regulations is currently comprised of
seven members who together received $25 million from NIH in fiscal year 2020,
and $54 million in other years.
This blog post was developed from a presentation I gave on
“How Institutional Funding in the U.S. Works Against Tobacco Harm Reduction” at
the 2021 Global Forum on Nicotine Conference.
The recorded video is available here.
Note added July 16, 2021:
I was notified by @phil_w888 via Twitter that the Canadian equivalent of the NIH, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, announced funding for a project last year on the Health Effects of Vaping. Incredibly, the description contained the following:
"Research projects exploring the use of vaping as a smoking cessation
tool or as a harm reduction strategy are not eligible for this funding
opportunity."
