The agency division led by Dr. Anthony Fauci is reportedly spending over $200,000 in a study designed to create transgendered monkeys on t...
The agency division led by Dr. Anthony Fauci is reportedly spending over $200,000 in a study designed to create transgendered monkeys on the grounds that this will somehow address the issue of transgender people getting HIV.
The Washington Free Beacon reported on Monday that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci directs, approved a $205,562 grant to Scripps Research for the study.
The funding, which was approved in November 2021, followed a previous grant to the same organization for the same purpose that was approved in November 2020.
The abstract for the study claims that the money is supporting vital research.
“HIV/AIDS thrives in the margins of society, where low education, unstable housing, and poverty heighten people’s vulnerability to HIV. No population is more affected by these social injustices than transgender persons. A case in point is transgender women (TGW}-individuals who were assigned a male sex at birth but express their gender along a feminine spectrum,” the abstract reads.
“Sadly, TGW have some of the highest concentrated HIV epidemics in the world, with a pooled global prevalence of 19% and a 49-fold higher odds ratio of acquiring HIV than non-transgender adults. A key part of gender affirmation in TGW is feminizing hormone therapy (FHT), of which the main drug is the hormone estradiol. Although the physical female traits triggered by FHT are well established, less is known about the immunological effects of FHT in TGW,” the study continues.
Bunk, said the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Dr. Katherine Roe, a neuroscientist with PETA, said the study is “yet another pointless, wasteful monkey torture experiment.”
A PETA blog summed up the experiment by noting “Anthony Fauci’s institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is — once again — wasting taxpayer money and harming animals.”
PETA noted that the experiment is designed to “subject male rhesus macaques to feminizing hormone therapy to see whether that makes them more susceptible to HIV, purportedly to help transgender women.”
But PETA said there is a fatal flaw in this argument.
“But rather than holding a proper clinical study with willing human patients that would yield relevant information, these experimenters have decided to use monkeys, who can’t become infected with HIV. It’s just bad science to suggest that dosing monkeys with feminizing medication makes them good stand-ins for humans,” the PETA blog said.
“Monkeys don’t get HIV, and after 40 years, hundreds of thousands of dead monkeys, billions of dollars, and no vaccines on the market, you’d think NIH would put funds into something that might actually work and could help humans,” PETA wrote.
Scripps Florida said testing what it called “sub-populations” is important to discover treatments for fatal diseases.
“The research you reference concerns a sub-population of people at greater risk of HIV infection, and factors that may or may not affect their response to a treatment/preventative approach in development,” a spokeswoman for Scripps Research told the Free Beacon. “It is through these types of targeted research studies that substantive progress against HIV, cancer, ALS, dementia—indeed most diseases and conditions—will be made.”
Fauci’s penchant for animal testing is well known. Last year, it was reported that Fauci approved experiments which infected beagles with heartworm larvae and later euthanized them. Another experiment reportedly infected beagles with mutated bacteria from ticks.
No comments