Paging NIH Director and His FOIA Guy For a Response to Request for ImPACT Founder Mark Lovell’s $2 Million in Federal Grant Applications

Except for the fact that public servants are being rude to a polite citizen’s inquiry – and, believe it or not, your humble blogger is not bursting into tears over that – it doesn’t matter that Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and John McGrath, an NIH official in charge of Freedom of Information Act matters, have ignored my two email requests for copies of the grant applications of Mark Lovell of ImPACT Applications and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Concussion Program.

The Lovell applications are public records and I will get them eventually. Perhaps a news organization with more juice than Concussion Inc. will get their hands on them before I do, and that would be fine. As my earlier reporting explained, the applications themselves are of secondary importance. Release of Lovell’s conflict-of-interest disclosures (assuming he made any) are in the control not of NIH but of UPMC; and that corrupt institution, full of corrupt and profit-first researchers, is no likelier to make those disclosures public than it is to publish its “private” new-and-improved ethics policy.

But for the record, here again is what transpired. On October 25, an NIH bureaucrat, whom I choose not to embarrass by naming at this time, asked for my mailing address, obviously with a view to sending me the Lovell documents. She then reversed herself and advised me to contact John McGrath. And neither McGrath nor his boss is returning messages based on the referral of their own staffer.

If any other journalists want to partner up with me in marshaling legal and other resources for a formal FOIA fight, if necessary, you can write to me at [email protected].

Irv Muchnick

FURTHER READING:

EXCLUSIVE: Did ImPACT Concussion Software Developer Mark Lovell Disclose Conflicts of Interest in Federal Grant Applications?