Dr. Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul got into another verbal jousting match this month, once again over gain-of-function research, the apparent fact that Fauci’s office greenlighted taxpayer subsidies for research on bat viruses in China, and the possibility that this research led to a lab leak that gave way to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Paul accused Fauci of refusing to admit that the Wuhan research was too dangerous to fund, urging Fauci to resign. But the bat research and alleged U.S. role in the origins of COVID-19 are far from the only scandal facing Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In fact, the NIAID has been under scrutiny for gruesome experiments carried out on dogs and on human children, experiments that indicate a troubling lack of concern for life. The public should be asking whether that systemic disregard for life, especially for human life, extended all the way to Wuhan. Did the federal public health bureaucracy’s disconnection from human dignity lay foundations for the pandemic?
If the status quo doesn’t change, COVID-19 and its associated fatalities, job losses, lockdowns, social isolation, and economic fallout may be just a taste of what is next under Fauci’s failed leadership. Knowing what they know now, the public is much less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt next time — and if the public doesn’t demand change now, there will be a next time.
According to a recent exposé by the nonprofit watchdog White Coat Waste Project, Fauci’s NIAID funded research on beagles conducted at the University of Georgia that involved painfully infecting the dogs with parasites and then euthanizing them at the end of the experiment. (The White Coat Waste Project contends that the dogs could have been rehabilitated and placed for adoption.) Researchers used the dogs to test a vaccine prior to evaluating it on humans, according to correspondence between the NIAID and FactCheck.org.
Animal research is a standard procedure in clinical testing that gives researchers an idea of how humans may react to experimental therapies before human subjects are tested. The National Institutes of Health says that animal research allows scientists to “identify new ways to treat illnesses, extend life, and improve health and well-being.” NIH goes on to say that “new hypotheses” are “tested in animals first in order to gather sufficient evidence of these benefits and risks before considering possible use in humans.”
These statements imply a values hierarchy in U.S. research ethics: namely, that the animal’s value is beneath that of the human and the animal can be used and ultimately sacrificed in the service of preserving, protecting, or improving human lives.
One can argue that experimenting on dogs is a necessary step on the path to improving the lives of human beings greatly. After all, “serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, from conception” is the stated mandate of all the agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIAID. Maybe there is even a legitimate argument that cutting up and euthanizing puppies was justified and aligned with the NIAID’s mandate.
This argument crumbles, however, in the face of the bigger scandal facing Fauci’s NIAID: revelations that his office funded research on unborn children who are killed, dissected, harvested for organs, and shipped in pieces from a “Tissue Hub and Collection Site” at the University of Pittsburgh to labs across the country. How does that square with the mandate to protect and preserve lives when lives are being butchered to satisfy grotesque medical curiosity? How does grafting scalps taken from babies killed at five months’ gestation onto the backs of lab rats to see whether the deceased children’s hair will continue to grow align with the mandate to serve and protect the public “from conception”? It doesn’t.
The U.S. public health apparatus is covering for its shocking treatment of dogs in Georgia with the ethical-sounding excuse that the U.S. government’s main concern is all about the humans, while in Pennsylvania, the same public health bureaucracy distributes taxpayer dollars to fund the demise and dissection of human children.
The public would be justified in asking whether the federal public health apparatus is acting in the interest of preserving human lives when it is an active, knowing, and willing participant in killing, organ-harvesting, and experimenting on the most defenseless children. Was improving and safeguarding human life the primary concern of those Wuhan lab researchers, or were they, like the NIAID-funded University of Pittsburgh researchers, operating on the conviction that sacrificing human lives may be an acceptable cost for achieving some other goal? The public should be asking these questions like their lives depend on it — because they do.
Kristan Hawkins (@KristanHawkins) is president of Students for Life of America, with more than 1,250 groups on college, university, and high school campuses in all 50 states. Subscribe to her podcast, Explicitly Pro-Life.
