Fauci’s ‘Kennel of Horrors’
A nonprofit called the White Coat Waste Project is devoted to investigating the precise uses of federal money in animal experimentation, making heavy use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to unearth evidence of both profligacy and cruelty.
In July, the group zeroed in on research authorized by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and in October publicized some of the disturbing details.
These included a lab in Tunisia that had reported receiving grants from our National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the division of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) that Fauci directs. At that lab, beagle puppies were force-fed an experimental drug, then left to be eaten alive by hundreds of sand flies — the flies starved in preparation for this test. In an experiment elsewhere, funded by NIAID, similar tests were conducted: the puppies drugged, surgically silenced — “de-barked,” to spare researchers from hearing the cries of pain — and killed.
In most big-name newspapers, these studies were deemed unsuitable reading. No evidence of the NIAID director’s failings broke through what writer Glenn Greenwald calls the “shield of liberal veneration.”
A proper statement of the case, conveying “grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs,” came in a letter to Fauci from Republican representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina and 15 of her colleagues, who requested a reply by November 19. Just what had been going on in the experiments, they wanted to know; why were the labs using dogs at all; and could the doctor explain the need for “cordectomy,” which “involves slitting a dog’s vocal cords in order to prevent them from barking, howling, or crying.”
"Fact-checking" sites inspected the claims, and in the short of it the accounts from White Coat, though disputed, were true. No, said NIAID, it had not underwritten the sand-fly experiment in Tunisia; this was funded by other, unnamed sources, and therefore, though critics had described it accurately, was not attributable to Fauci.
But, yes, NIAID had funded other experiments on dogs by the same people at the same lab in Tunisia. And it had supported a very similar experiment on beagles, done at a contract lab in California, in which 44 puppies were subjected to severe methods, including “cordectomies” to muffle the irksome yapping that can fill a room when dogs are tortured.
A picture accompanying news stories had showed puppies strapped down, their heads in mesh cages as parasites fed on them. That photo, claimed NIAID, was of the other study, supposedly done with other funding. NIAID didn’t volunteer other pictures to help "clarify" the difference. In any event, whatever Fauci’s knowledge of the business in Tunisia — and the funding source still remains murky — he has for decades overseen funding for many such experiments on dogs and other animals.
In a 2018 Intercept piece, a writer exposed “a largely hidden, poorly regulated, and highly profitable industry in the United States that has a gruesome function: breeding dogs for the sole purpose of often torturous experimentation, after which the dogs are killed because they are no longer of use.”
In any given year, we learn, some 60,000 dogs in the United States are condemned to this fate, spending “their entire, often short, existence locked in a small cage” — at corporate research centers, at universities, at NIH labs in Bethesda, Md., and elsewhere.
They are “bred to suffer,” in tests that often serve purely commercial interests, and that keep the federal appropriations and grant money coming, while yielding hardly anything of value to medicine, and nothing that could not be gained by other means.
The Intercept piece is an unflinching work of journalism, and after reading it one can easily recognize the opposite, in the form of an October 25 defense of the dog experiments by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. The column reads like an exhibit in another kind of study, supporting the hypothesis that, when their icons are threatened, leftists can be made to believe and parrot anything.
Complacent, gullible, and, in closing his piece, even juvenile with a line about critics “barking triumphantly” at Fauci’s awkward situation, Milbank at least acknowledged the kennel-of-horrors controversy.
This happened to be around the same time that a key element in the Wuhan-lab investigation was confirmed by NIH, in a letter regarding gain-of-function objectives in coronavirus experiments it had supported at Fauci’s direction. And even that revelation, wrote Milbank, was “not of great consequence.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/faucis-kennel-of-horrors-a-study-in-animal-protection-as-a-conservative-cause/
