Animal rights group PETA has once again thanked the Trump administration for its push to end government-funded animal testing after National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya announced the closure of the agency’s last beagle testing facility.
Bhattacharya, who gained international recognition for being one of the few major voices in the medical field who spoke out against coronavirus lockdowns, made the announcement over the weekend on Fox News:
“It’s very easy, for instance, to cure Alzheimer’s in mice. But those things don’t translate to humans,” the Trump-appointed NIH director told host Rachel Campos-Duffy on Sunday.
“So we put forward a policy to replace animals in research with technological advances, AI and other tools, that actually translate better to human health.”
When he revealed, “We got rid of all of the beagle experiments on NIH campus,” Campus-Duffy replied, “Amen.”
In a statement obtained by Breitbart News, PETA Director of Science Advancement and Outreach Dr. Emily Trunell welcomed the “long-overdue” news:
After more than a decade of agitation, tens of thousands of emails to NIH officials from PETA supporters, and a 2021 landmark lawsuit, PETA welcomes the long-overdue news that NIH is canceling at least one of the appalling sepsis experiments that inflicted prolonged suffering on animals in federal and federally funded laboratories. Since 2013, PETA has argued for the complete termination of these cruel and scientifically worthless experiments on ALL animals—and we will continue to fight until every last one is ended. It is also critical to underscore that the beagles tormented and killed in these now-terminated painful experiments were purchased from Envigo. This notorious facility was shut down after PETA’s undercover investigation exposed the nightmarish conditions in which thousands of dogs were warehoused. PETA’s investigation led to the historic rescue of 4,000 dogs.
The end of beagle testing at NIH comes after the discovery of horrific experiments done on the loveable animals at the direction of Dr. Anthony Fauci from his long tenure at the health agency.
Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci responds to accusations by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) as he testifies before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, Pool)
A years-long investigation by medical watchdog group White Coat Waste (WCW) revealed that the NIH killed over 2,100 beagles in “brutal septic shock experiments” since 1986.
“The NIH pumps pneumonia-causing bacteria into beagles’ lungs, bleeds them out, and forces dogs into septic shock,” the report states. “After four days of infection, NIH kills the beagles—and stuffs their bodies into a refrigerator.”
After Bhattacharya announced the good news on Sunday, WCW Project Founder Anthony Bellotti told the Daily Caller News Foundation that his organization is “proud” of this outcome:
As the watchdog that first uncovered and battled Dr. Fauci’s beagle tests (the biggest animal testing scandal in history), we’re proud that White Coat Waste has closed the NIH’s last in-house beagle laboratory—and the US government’s biggest dog lab. We applaud the President for cutting this wasteful NIH spending and will keep fighting until we defund all dog labs at home and abroad.
WCW exposed Fauci’s NIH division for funding an experiment at Kansas State University involving hundreds of ticks feasting on puppies injected with a mutant bacteria back in 2021, Breitbart News reported.
According to the report, 28 beagle puppies were killed each year for that particular study, bringing the total fatalities “between 126 and 138 dogs” since it began in December 2007.
In another investigation, the watchdog group revealed that Fauci’s division “shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive.”
“They also locked beagles alone in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies,” the organization added.
The Trump administration has been stepping away from animal testing within other agencies as well, with PETA also recently praising the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for “helping spare tens of thousands of animals each year.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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