More Fauci dog abuse uncovered

It’s been almost two years since the #Beaglegate scandal broke, which revealed Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had been using taxpayer dollars to carry out unspeakable experiments on beagles in labs in Tunisia. To make matters worse, that torture was being carried out for the completely unjustifiable mission of developing a new allergy drug.

The backlash was swift, severe, and warranted, and the public scrutiny led to Fauci canceling some of these kinds of experiments—including $1.8 million in hay fever experiments on beagle puppies.

But recent records obtained by the nonprofit The White Coat Waste Project (where I am a Fellow, and which broke the original Beagle-gate story) show that Fauci’s dog abuse runs deeper and wider than labs in Tunisia.

Through Iowa Public Records Law, WCW discovered experiments on nearly a dozen foxhounds between the ages of 3 and 10 years old from 2017-2019. The dogs were abandoned at the University of Iowa by their owners and then used in tests that involved small black sandflies being strapped to the ear of the dogs to conduct Leishmania experiments. The research was carried out in collaboration with the NIAID.

Whether or not the previous owners knew the dogs would be used in this manner is unclear, but all of the dogs were killed in 2019.

The University worked hard to block the discovery of this information, and admitted that it destroyed records detailing what the experiments on these dogs involved. However, WCW was unable to unearth the specifics in a 2021 paper published by NIAID and the University of Iowa’s own scientists.

According to the WCW summary of that paper, “In short, taxpayer-funded experimenters from NIAID and the University of Iowa are drugging abandoned pet dogs and locking them in mesh cages. Then, the white coats are strapping capsules full of hungry sand flies to the dogs’ ears so the insects could “feed” on the dogs. When the experiment is over, the dogs are killed and dissected, even though effective treatments for their illness exist.”

The dog experiments were funded through two active grants from NIAID and the NIH’s Fogarty International Center which have received close to $10 million in taxpayers’ money combined. Both are set to expire this June.

Enough is enough. We must demand that the US government quit using our tax dollars in this way. It is entirely unethical and inexcusable, not to mention unnecessary.

When people tell you taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society, show them this. Taxes are actually the price we pay to torture animals in government labs.

Hannah is a Fellow at the White Coat Waste Project.

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