Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President Donald Trump’s director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced the closure of the agency’s last remaining beagle experiment lab over the weekend after former NIH physician Dr. Anthony Fauci’s horrific beagle-testing scandal was exposed.
“It’s very easy, for instance, to cure Alzheimer’s in mice. But those things don’t translate to humans,” Bhattacharya told Fox News 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 made the announcement that “We got rid of all of the beagle experiments on NIH campus,” Campus-Duffy said, “Amen.”
NIH confirmed the move on social media, saying it has enacted an “initiative to expand innovative, human-based science while reducing animal use in research, including getting rid of all the beagle experiments on the NIH campus.”
A years-long investigation by medical watchdog group White Coat Waste 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.”
“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,” White Coat Waste Project Founder Anthony Bellotti said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation following the good news. “We applaud the President for cutting this wasteful NIH spending and will keep fighting until we defund all dog labs at home and abroad.”
White Coat Waste 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 animal rights group PETA 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.
