Ending Fauci's taxpayer-funded animal cruelty is a conservative cause

National Review’s Matthew Scully writes, “A nonprofit called the White Coat Waste Project is devoted to investigating the precise uses of federal money in animal experimentation, making heavy use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to unearth evidence of both profligacy and cruelty. In July, the group zeroed in on research that might have been authorized by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and in October publicized some of the disturbing details.

"Paul’s bill would free drug companies to use other techniques, and also eliminate the animal-use requirement in NIH-funded experiments for new drugs and vaccines." https://t.co/HoEKH7sbhd

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) November 22, 2021

These included a lab in Tunisia that had reported receiving grants from our National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the division of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) that Fauci directs. At that lab, beagle puppies were force-fed an experimental drug, then left to be eaten alive by hundreds of sand flies — the flies starved in preparation for this test. In an experiment elsewhere, funded by NIAID, similar tests were conducted: the puppies drugged, surgically silenced — 'de-barked,' to spare researchers from hearing the cries of pain — and killed.

In most big-name newspapers, these studies were deemed unsuitable reading, while in the New York Post, Daily Mail, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, and at Fox News, and elsewhere, other revelations followed about 'Fauci’s Kennel of Horrors,' as one headline put it. No evidence of the NIAID director’s other failings had ever broken through what writer Glenn Greenwald calls the 'shield of liberal veneration.' Maybe these dog stories would be the end of him.

Fauci's @NIAIDNews forced you to pay $375K to have #beagles eaten alive by flies in a foreign lab ??#Beaglegate

RT if you oppose this sickening spending?? https://t.co/JmAKsXefzV pic.twitter.com/UCUEvOdVgV — White Coat Waste Project??️ (@WhiteCoatWaste) September 2, 2021

In their #ArrestFauci, Twitter-mob version as the controversy played out, the allegations were needlessly personal, suggesting depravity when only truthfulness and judgment were at issue....

And if you were following the scandal at the time, maybe you noticed another recasting, surely for the good. Placed by the lab revelations in the role of defenders of animals against institutional abuse, prominent Republicans found themselves on the right side of a moral issue with broad public support. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, Tucker Carlson on his show, and other conservatives, spoke with force and eloquence about what DeSantis called 'despicable' treatment of the dogs, undoubtedly conveying the bipartisan sentiments of most listeners as well."

Read the entire column.