Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, listens during a hearing looking into the budget estimates for National Institute of Health (NIH) and the state of medical research on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on May 26, 2021. (Photo by Stefani Reynolds / POOL / AFP) (Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 12:04 PM PT – Monday, October 25, 2021
Twenty-three lawmakers have demanded justification from the National Institutes of Health for their canine experiments, which they deem “cruel” and “reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.”
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) sent a letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci on Saturday, asking why the NIH spent nearly $1.7 million worth of taxpayer dollars on drug tests involving 44 six-to-eight-month-old beagle puppies. The letter states this isn’t the first time the agency funded drug research on dogs and that they reportedly spent more than $400,000 studying flies infecting beagles with parasites.
“Under the NIH, where they are abusing with taxpayer dollars experiments on beagles. It’s heartbreaking to hear about the experiments done on animals and dogs and this one in particular with beagles, where their vocal chords are cut out and they are silenced when they are going through this abuse and drug testing,” explained Mace.
Yesterday, I sent a letter to Dr. Fauci regarding cruel, taxpayer-funded experiments on puppies; debarking before drugging and killing them. Thankful to my 23 democrat and republican colleagues who signed on. This is disgusting. What say you @NIH pic.twitter.com/c54SXipD9Q
— Rep. Nancy Mace (@RepNancyMace) October 23, 2021
White Coast Waste investigators found that Fauci’s NIH funded 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.” Investigators also discovered that they locked the beagles in cages alone in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights in order to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies.
Of particular concern to Mace was how the puppies’ vocal chords were severed so their pained cries couldn’t be heard during experimentation, a procedure opposed by the American Veterinary Medical Association.
“Fauci and the NIH is using almost $2 million on these beagle experiments where these 44 puppies have been debarked. Their vocal chords have been cut out so they can’t be heard and then they are killed and dissected,” she stated.
The Food and Drug Administration has recently stated it doesn’t mandate that human drugs be studied in dogs.
“There are many different alternatives to this type of testing that are out there and we certainly shouldn’t be using federal dollars, taxpayer dollars for these kinds of experiments in federal labs,” Mace stressed.
However, for Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the implications extend further than taxpayer funded cruelty. In a recent interview, Johnson said the government funds all kinds of outrageous research projects, but the real concern is how all this government funding has corrupted science.
