Animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals demanded the resignation of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectio...
Animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals demanded the resignation of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ top brass and its head, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on Wednesday over a report alleging that the National Institutes of Health spent millions of taxpayer dollars in gruesome dog experiments.
In a Friday afternoon post on Twitter, PETA wrote, “Our position is clear. ALL those in leadership at NIH, including Fauci, should resign.”
PETA’s tweet was in response to a Thursday Twitter post by Keith Malinak of conservative news network Blaze Media, who asked the organization if it would “demand the resignation of Dr. Anthony Fauci the way [Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky] did,” since “America figured beagles being tortured to death would be in your wheelhouse.”
Both Twitter posts come after a July report by The White Coast Waste Project which found that through the NIH, the federal government spent “$424,000 to commission a study in which healthy beagles are given an experimental drug and then intentionally infested with flies that carry a disease-causing parasite that affects humans.”
The White Coat Waste Project is a bipartisan group that calls itself a “coalition of 400,000+ liberty-lovers and animal-lovers opposed to the government’s wasteful spending on animal experiments.”
According to the group, the records it received through the Freedom of Information Act uncovered that during the experiments, the dogs also “vocalized in pain.”
When the experiment was over, the dogs “will all be killed,” the White Coat Waste Project report stated.
After the report’s findings were released, several Democrats and Republicans, including Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, wrote to Fauci, who serves as the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, asking for answers about the experiments.
“Anthony Fauci and all the NIH directors have defended a cruel, archaic system for far too long. It’s time for them to get out of the way and let modern scientists take over,” PETA senior vice president for laboratory investigations Kathy Guillermo told Fox News.
“They’ve known for at least a decade that torturing dogs, monkeys and other animals is delaying treatments and cures for humans, but they continually defend the status quo — at the cost of millions of animal lives and billions of tax dollars.”
“PETA urges all Americans to ask President Biden to appoint NIH leaders who understand that organs-on-a-chip, super computers, 3-D tissue models and other high-tech research methods must replace animals in the laboratory now,” Guillermo said.
When Fox News approached the NIH for comment on the report, the NIH replied in October with a statement saying, “All animals used in NIH-funded research are protected by laws, regulations and policies to ensure the smallest possible number of subjects and the greatest commitment to their welfare.”
“The images of beagles were drawn from a manuscript published in July 2021 in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases,” the NIH said, referring to images attached to the White Coat Waste Project report.
“The manuscript mistakenly cited support from NIAID, when in fact NIAID did not support this specific research shown in the images of the beagles being circulated.”
“The research described by the White Coat Waste Project at the University of Georgia focuses on lymphatic filariasis (LF), a mosquito-transmitted parasitic disease that affects millions of people in many countries around the world,” the organization’s statement to Fox News added.
The NIH, however, didn’t deny such experiments took place or were funded, Fox News reported.
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