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Millions of dollars of taxpayer money is being funnelled into a government animal testing scheme, a new exposé has revealed. It found that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is breeding thousands of monkeys on a remote island for experiments.
The White Coat Waste Project (WCW), a taxpayer watchdog group focusing on scientific research, conducted the investigation.
‘Bred to die’
Morgan Island, off the southeast coast of South Carolina, is home to thousands of monkeys, WCW explains.
But the animals are the “property” of the NIH, headed by Anthony Fauci, who is also the chief medical advisor to the US president.
At Morgan Island, “monkeys are born to suffer and bred to die,” WCW says. As such, unauthorized visitors are strictly prohibited.
Documentation obtained by the watchdog group found that “a minimum” of 500 animals must be handed over to the government every year for experimentation.
Animal cruelty
The monkeys are subject to extremely painful and deadly tests, and are not provided with pain relief. In one experiment, 12 monkeys were injected with the deadly Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever virus (CCHFV).
The animals developed fever, lethargy, and hemorrhages before they died. The monkeys who survived the infection were also killed.
Researchers also infected primates with tuberculosis, as well as Ebola and other hemorrhagic viruses, like Lassa virus and Nipah virus. Further, they induced sepsis (blood infections) in the animals, and modeled SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) on others.
The NIH is aware that the experiments are damaging, acknowledging in its own documentation that animals will experience pain, distress, fever, rash, respiratory and neurological disorders, diarrhea, internal hemorrhage, and multi-organ failure leading to death.
Cruel and unnecessary
Since March 2018, Fauci has “wasted” $13.5 million on the monkey testing, WCW reports.
Devin Murphy, public policy and communications manager at WCW, called the system “revolting.”
And WCW’s scientific adviser, primate expert Stacy Lopresti-Goodman, PhD., explains that the testing is ineffective too.
“Primate experimentation is a cruel and notoriously unreliable way to develop drugs and treatments for humans, and it doesn’t deserve taxpayers’ support,” they said.
The watchdog groups’ medical adviser, Tiffani Milless, MD, added: “As a pathologist with expertise in how disease affects human patients, I can say with certainty that infecting nonhuman primates with painful and debilitating illnesses with the goal of curing humans is not just cruel, but it’s incredibly wasteful.
“The NIH should stop squandering tax dollars on wasteful and cruel primate testing that doctors like me cannot use to actually help people.”
