by Greg Piper
Panel Democrats show surprising restraint amid attacks on Anthony Fauci, gender affirming care.
House Oversight Committee Republicans and a witness Thursday denounced Dr. Anthony Fauci – the 38-year leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who funded research that supercharged viruses, tormented pets and primates, and grafted aborted human tissue on rodents – 18 times at a hearing on federally funded animal cruelty.
The Democrats on the Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Subcommittee did not once step in to defend the newly unprotected retiree, as Democrats did at prior hearings, or argue the GOP was exaggerating his role in gruesome animal testing.
They didn't even object to the multiple denunciations of so-called gender affirming care, meaning hormonal and surgical procedures to make subjects resemble the opposite sex, in the context of NIAID funding such experiments on mice, rats and monkeys.
The surprising comity on an admittedly small subcommittee suggests a vibe shift in Washington on at least some issues where the major political parties' interests overlap and Democrats see an opening to get Republicans to support federal spending on medical research.
Ohio Rep. Shontel Brown, the top Democrat on the GOP-led subcommittee, praised her working relationship with Chairwoman Nancy Mace, R-S.C., and touted innovative non-animal research in Brown's district and her sponsorship of the Humane Cosmetics Act.
The feds spent $2.5 million on fertility studies of transgender mice and $1.1 million to see whether female rats receiving testosterone to "mimic transgender men" were more likely to overdose on an LGBTQ "party drug," and "forcibly transitioned" male monkeys to see whether hormones increased their risk to HIV, which cannot infect them, Mace said in her opening statement
The Biden-Harris administration was "so eager to propagate their radical gender ideology across all facets of American society that they were surgically mutilating animal genitals" and calling it gender affirming care, she marveled.
Many of the cited figures at the hearing came from the animal research watchdog White Coat Waste Project, including the prior administration's $10 million spent on transgender animal experiments – some through diversity, equity and inclusion grants – and smaller amounts on painful puppy experiments in Tunisia and China, including in military-tied labs.
WCW Senior Vice President Justin Goodman identified three beagle lab survivors in the hearing room named Nellie, Beasley and Oliver. The pups' presence delighted Rep. Eli Crane, R-Arizona, who had requested "therapy dogs" to calm Democrats at an Oversight hearing Wednesday and found the beagles so calming Thursday he asked they be "mandatory" at hearings.
Johns Hopkins University public health professor Paul Locke, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine Research Policy Director Elizabeth Baker and Goodman agreed the feds had little to show for decades of massive outlays on animal research while doling out peanuts for non-animal research such as computer modeling and "organs on a chip."
Animal experiments range from the "savage to the stupid," from "hamster fight clubs" to cat-constipation tests that combine rectal insertion with electrocution, Goodman said.
Federal programs often latch on to a "social trend" and researchers "use it as a money grab," with their institutions taking 25-40% "off the top" of the grants for indirect costs for a "slush fund," he said.
Said Mace; "Some people might describe that as money laundering."
The National Institutes of Health actually doled out $240 million on transgender animal experiments, $26 million in active funding and 95% of it from Fauci's NIAID, according to Goodman, whose group filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests a year.
He thanked Mace for helping WCW stop more Fauci-approved tests, including $1.8 million to study a new hay fever drug on the false grounds that dogs were required for FDA approval.
Goodman also blamed "institutional inertia" and "circular reasoning" – that agencies had always experimented on animals – for not innovating outside animals, while Locke said feds were "passive and reactive" and needed a push from Congress to develop "criteria for validation and acceptance of these new technologies."
While the National Toxicology Program’s Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods evaluates non-animal research, NIH funds seven primate research centers that get hundreds of millions a year "with little regard for actual human translation," Baker said. Mace said her district has one, calling the arrangement a "racket."
Baker's group unearthed NIH's $15 million to a single heart-failure researcher at Wayne State University who performed surgeries on dogs, stabbed them in the heart and forced them to run until they die or the equipment malfunctions, producing "hundreds of dead dogs" for no human benefit, Baker said. Her written testimony cites the group's FOIAs.
The feds know that animals are "not good surrogates for humans" due to "insurmountable species differences," and that nine in 10 drugs that passed animal trials will fail in human trials, bloating research budgets while delaying useful drugs, she said. "If we truly want to make America healthy again, we have to make science human again."
Congress also must compel more sunlight from the feds, Baker told Brown, the ranking member. "We don't know really how much spending is going to animal experiments" except for broad figures like NIH in 2016 saying 47% of extramural grants used mice.
She told the Democrat to probe the National Cancer Institute, given that animals are particularly "poor predictors" for cancer. "We have cures for cancer in mice – we don't in humans."
The feds give no assurances to non-animal researchers that their data will even be accepted, according to Locke. "They seem to want folks who are in the field to bring the data to them and then they're gonna make the decision."
Goodman told Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., the problem is that smart researchers have "no incentive to innovate and actually solve problems" because animal testing is "what actually keeps the grants coming." The first Trump administration's EPA set a timeline to phase out animal testing, but the Biden administration revoked it under activist pressure, he said.
Whenever lawmakers and advocates expose such outlays, "we are lashed out at, we're called crazy and conspiracists," said Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., noting WCW exposed NIH's funding to Colorado State University for procuring Asian bats from labs connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
She asked Goodman how much the feds have spent on "animal cruelty testing" since 1998. He estimated half a trillion dollars out of an estimated NIH budget of $1 trillion over that period.
Greg Piper
Source: https://justthenews.com/government/congress/wokeness-federal-agencies-protects-cruel-pointless-animal-testing-house
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