Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President Donald Trump’s director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said the agency's last remaining beagle experiment lab was shut down over the weekend.
NIH confirmed in a post to social media that it has enacted an “initiative to expand innovative, human-based science while reducing animal use in research, including getting rid of all the beagle experiments on the NIH campus.”
Former NIH chief Dr. Anthony Fauci’s horrific beagle-testing experiments were exposed by medical watchdog group White Coat Waste, which revealed that the NIH had killed over 2,100 beagles in “brutal septic shock experiments” since 1986.
Fauci was at the NIH from 1968 until his retirement at the end of 2022.
“The NIH pumps pneumonia-causing bacteria into beagles’ lungs, bleeds them out, and forces dogs into septic shock,” the watchdog group said. “After four days of infection, NIH kills the beagles—and stuffs their bodies into a refrigerator.”
In 2022, White Coat Waste exposed Fauci’s NIH division for funding an experiment at Kansas State University involving hundreds of ticks feasting on puppies injected with a mutant bacteria, Breitbart News reported.
In another investigation, the watchdog group revealed that Fauci’s division “shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive.”
“They also locked beagles alone in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies,” the organization added.
“As the watchdog that first uncovered and battled Dr. Fauci’s beagle tests (the biggest animal testing scandal in history), we’re proud that White Coat Waste has closed the NIH’s last in-house beagle laboratory—and the U.S. government’s biggest dog lab,” White Coat Waste Project Founder Anthony Bellotti said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We applaud the President for cutting this wasteful NIH spending and will keep fighting until we defund all dog labs at home and abroad.”
Bhattacharya told Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy on Sunday: “It’s very easy, for instance, to cure Alzheimer’s in mice. But those things don’t translate to humans So we put forward a policy to replace animals in research with technological advances, AI and other tools, that actually translate better to human health.”
The Trump Administration has been shutting down animal testing within other agencies as well. Animal rights group PETA praised the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for “helping spare tens of thousands of animals each year.”
Watch @NIHDirector_Jay on @FoxNews with @RCamposDuffy where he discusses a new NIH initiative to expand innovative, human-based science while reducing animal use in research, including getting rid of all the beagle experiments on the NIH campus. pic.twitter.com/qfL5oepOBX
— NIH (@NIH) May 4, 2025
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