Opinion

COX: Don’t Let Dems Gaslight You — Fauci Absolutely Tortured Beagles

OPINION
Dr. Fauci Testifies In House On COVID Origins

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Hannah Cox Contributor
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The notorious Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared before Congress on Monday for a highly anticipated, explosive hearing during which members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic took turns grilling and praising him for his actions over the past couple of years. 

Ultimately, the hearing fell along typical partisan lines, creating a whiplash effect. Republicans recounted the numerous ways Fauci abused his power — working to cover up his own paper trail leading to the Wuhan lab, enforcing masking and social distancing rules without any actual scientific proof of their efficacy, shutting down schools, and orchestrating a campaign to persecute and silence those who dared to question him. 

Democrats would then take the microphone and declare Fauci barely mortal, an American icon, and a giant among men. Frankly, they reached levels of delulu in defense of their guy that would make TikTok women proud.

But perhaps the strangest of their denials (given that there is absolute proof of all of the accusations Republicans brought against Fauci) was their insistence that government scientists never oversaw animal torture — a denial that the pro-Fauci camp quickly amplified online.

Republican Reps. Nicole Malliotakis of New York and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia both raised the issue of Fauci’s participation in animal torture. Their lines of questioning, bizarrely, seemed to catch both Dr. Fauci and his supporters off guard.

Fauci was finally cornered into a response and admitted, for the first time, to signing off on numerous experiments that used millions of taxpayer dollars to torture animals. In his response, he tried to claim that the NIH uses strict regulatory processes for this testing and prioritizes the humane treatment of the animals.

While it may be the first time Fauci has been forced to confess to his behavior we’ve known about it for years thanks to the advocacy of the White Coat Waste Project (WCW) — a nonprofit that works to abolish taxpayer-funded animal torture. They’ve been tracking Fauci for years due to the numerous programs he ran during his tenure at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectioyus Diseases (NIAID) that tortured animals. In fact, it’s why they stumbled upon his covert funding of the Wuhan lab back in 2020.

By filing Freedom of Infomation Act (FOIA) requests and launching investigations into the activities of various government organizations, WCW also uncovered Fauci’s beagle torture — a story that made national news years ago. For the record, the experiments could in no way be described as “humane” by any rational person. Instead, they allowed the beagles to be de-barked, infested with biting flies and mutant ticks, and poisoned in U.S. and foreign labs.

While Fauci apologists will claim that such research is needed to “save lives!” and “prevent pandemics!” the reality is these experiments were carried out to develop allergy medications. They are not necessary and not life-saving.

And puppies weren’t the only animals that faced danger in Dr. Fauci’s torture chambers. In true Cruella DeVille fashion he also set his sights on kittens. The plan was to revamp a canceled USDA program that forced 3,254 lab kittens to eat diseased parts of 2,182 dogs and cats — strays and pets obtained from China and other foreign wet markets. Parasites that cause toxoplasmosis were collected from kittens’ feces for use in other experiments. Then, all kittens were killed and incinerated even though they were healthy and adoptable.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plan was to bring these experiments back at the University of California-Davis (UC-Davis) before the WCW stepped in and sounded the alarm. FOIA documents obtained by WCW proved that the NIAID (run by Fauci) had shipped over $419,000 to UC-Davis to establish a new Kitten Slaughterhouse for toxoplasmosis experiments since 2022.

This is in no way an exhaustive list of the animal torture Fauci personally oversaw during his tenure in government. It would be equally impossible to fully recap all the programs WCW has uncovered.

Tribalism is bad for people in a variety of ways, but perhaps its biggest threat is its propensity to rob extreme partisans of their ability to think logically, form opinions based on evidence, and change their minds when presented with more information. That was certainly true of Fauci and his fans during the worst of the COVID response,  and it seems to still be infecting them to this day.

Hannah Cox is the President and Co-Founder of BASEDPolitics, a frequent guest on Fox News, and a fellow for the White Coat Waste Project.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.