When U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) released her Green New Deal in 2019, conservatives scoffed at her vision of “economic security” for those “unwilling to work.” How are scientists, who squander $20 billion in taxpayer funds annually on cruel and wasteful animal experiments, any different? Socialized medicine is a non-starter for most Americans, but the National Institutes of Health’s model is socialized medical research. Change is long overdue.
Unless you were living under a rock in 2021, you probably heard about White Coat Waste Project’s (WCW) #BeagleGate investigation exposing Anthony Fauci’s cruel and wasteful experiments on beagles. To no one’s surprise, taxpayers hated to learn that our money is wasted poisoning puppies, infesting them with ticks and flies, and cutting out their vocal cords.
Or maybe you heard something about Fauci’s transgender monkey experiments? With his $6 billion budget, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. WCW uncovered that Fauci funds an entire monkey island in South Carolina. Uninhabited by humans, but home to thousands of monkeys, the island is closer to “The Twilight Zone” than Shangri-La: Every year, hundreds of primates (owned by Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases) are ripped from the island and shipped to Fauci’s labs, where they undergo wasteful and fiendish experiments before being killed.
The NIH claims that animal experiments like these are driving health breakthroughs, like new medicines and treatments. They rarely do. As Dr. Tom Stossel, professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School, noted in 2017: “More than 80% of new drug approvals originate from work solely performed in private companies” and the “private economy, not the government, actually discovers and develops most of the insights and products that advance health.”
The NIH itself acknowledges that at least 90 percent of drugs tested in animals fail in human trials because they are ineffective or toxic; they also state that “animal models often fail to provide good ways to mimic disease or predict how drugs will work in humans.”
With such a dismal return on investment, why should taxpayers be forced to foot the bill?
In that spirit, our taxpayer watchdog organization would like to offer a challenge to animal experimenters: find your own funding.
If you genuinely think torturing puppies will lead to a valuable medical breakthrough, you can bet that the private sector will be interested, too.
Want to cripple and kill kittens like the Veteran’s Administration is doing? Feed monkeys natural herbs and videotape them having sex in a Chinese lab? Electro-shock small animals and deprive them of water in fear experiments with your Chinese Communist Party buddies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Thinking about putting turkeys on treadmills, teaching mice to binge drink, or addicting fish to nicotine and ecstasy? Go compete in the marketplace!
If these white coats are unable to secure funding on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or elsewhere in the private sector, that would also be very telling.
In reality, the private sector knows that animal testing is incredibly inefficient and wasteful, so corporations have reduced their spending on it. Unfortunately, the federal government is immune to market-based incentives; Uncle Sam outspends the entire private sector by a ratio of 2-1 on animal tests.
If, however, you don’t believe the private sector would fund these wasteful animal experiments—why should taxpayers, especially when they don’t want to?
A December 2021 poll of 1,000 Americans conducted by Lincoln Park Strategies found that a supermajority—Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike—want the NIH to cut wasteful spending on animal experimentation.
Our proposal is something that lawmakers and taxpayers across the spectrum can support to cut government waste and save lives—human and animal—in 2022.