The National Institutes of Health have used taxpayer dollars to fund myriad gruesome clinical trials in which animals have been injected with hormones, experimental vaccines, and trial drugs.
The sprawling government public health research agency finances a wide range of trials in the United States and overseas in which animals such as mice, dogs, and monkeys are used to develop vaccines and therapeutics, including those designed to fight COVID-19.
The agency, which has a budget of about $43 billion, is facing growing pressure from animal rights groups to curtail animal testing amid investigations into taxpayer-funded trials in puppies and rhesus monkeys. Many trials for antiviral therapeutics and vaccines have involved animals and are funded through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the NIH agency headed by President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“Mr. Fauci … apparently thinks he owes the public no response to his institute’s funding of pointless experiments on monkeys — or dogs or any other species for that matter,” said Kathy Guillermo, senior vice president of animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Here is a look at some of the most troubling animal trials initiated by NIH-funded researchers.
Antiparasitic vaccine trial in beagle puppies
An investigation by the conservative watchdog group White Coat Waste Project, founded in 2013 by former Republican strategist Anthony Bellotti, revealed in a series of reports last year that the NIH was administering an experimental drug to beagle puppies and subjecting them to bites from parasitic flies.
The ongoing trial, conducted by University of Georgia researchers, was funded through the NIAID. It was part of the development process for a vaccine to protect against a tropical disease called lymphatic filariasis, which has no cure. At the end of the experiment, the beagles will all have to be euthanized for blood collection, according to WCWP.
Using documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, WCWP reported that the trial began in Nov. 2020 and the beagles were to be euthanized after 196 days.
“According to researchers at the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine, beagles are the standard dog model used in this type of research,” Greg Trevor, associate vice president of communications at the University of Georgia, told Newsweek. “We do not take lightly the decision to use such animals in some of our research.”
Two dozen bipartisan lawmakers signed on to pressure Fauci to curtail all NIH-funded research overseas that involves dogs following a separate investigation from WCWP showing that the NIAID spent nearly $1.7 million between 2018 and 2019 on drug tests involving beagle puppies. The puppies were also subjected to cordectomies, or the surgical removal of vocal cords, to reduce crying, barking, and howling.
“This cruel procedure … seems to have been performed so that experimenters would not have to listen to the pained cries of the beagle puppies,” said Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace in the letter to Fauci. “This is a reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.”
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Female hormone injections in male monkeys
The NIH granted more than $205,000 to Scripps Research in Florida to study why transgender women have such high rates of HIV infection compared to cisgender adults. After injecting the feminizing hormone estradiol into male rhesus monkeys, researchers studied its effects on their immune systems’ ability to fight off HIV infection. The experiment aims to give scientists “a better understanding of how [feminizing hormone therapy] impacts the male immune system,” and it “may provide new insights into how to prevent HIV infection in [transgender women].” It is worth noting here that nonhuman primates cannot contract HIV. Rather, scientists inject them with Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, the disease that has the same virological and clinical hallmarks of HIV infection in humans.
“It’s just bad science to suggest that dosing monkeys with feminizing medication makes them good stand-ins for humans,” PETA said on Monday. “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.”
The federal government has invested at least $29 million over the past two years in the facilities that breed and house monkeys used in lab trials, according to Nature. A shortage of test monkeys was made worse during the pandemic because they were used for vaccine and therapeutics trials before being tested in humans. The Biden administration is expected to propose a 27% increase in funding for U.S. National Primate Research Centers, potentially adding $30 million to their budgets.
Fighting mice to mimic racial aggression and its effects on colorectal cancer risk
A team of University of Illinois at Chicago researchers received nearly $520,000 in NIH funding for experiments on mice in 2020. The researchers sought to determine the extent to which structural racial aggression against African Americans contributes to colorectal cancer.
PETA scored a major win in June 2021, when the University of Illinois at Chicago informed it that the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, a branch of the NIH, had cut funding for the experiments. PETA had taken aim at the epidemiologist at the head of the study, Lisa Tussing-Humphreys, who studies the effects of behavioral and psychosocial factors on cancer diagnoses, in a scathing letter about the trials to NIMHD Director Eliseo J. Perez-Stable. In the May 2021 letter, PETA pressured Perez-Stable to stop financing the trials, calling the premise of the experiment “racist.”
“According to [Tussing-Humphreys], exposing mice to ‘episodic aggression’ — that is, forcing these animals to fight each other — purportedly will help develop ‘novel strategies to reduce racial disparities’ in colorectal cancer,” PETA wrote in May 2021. “Obviously, forcing mice to fight each other does not accurately mimic the experiences of African Americans in real life, and any suggestion that it does is wrong and frankly insulting.”
The NIH lists the project lead as Lisa Tussing-Humphreys. However, Tussing-Humphreys told the Washington Examiner that she did not oversee the animal testing portion of the experiment. “That PETA targeted was not funded by NIH … was to be led by another researcher, and should have been removed from the publicly available abstract when the research was funded.”
But Guillermo told the Washington Examiner, “If NIH did not fund it, it’s not clear who did and if tax dollars were involved. We have received no acceptable reason for such an absurd and cruel experiment — probably because there isn’t one.”
