In early February, the House Oversight Committee held an investigative hearing featuring testimony from Justin Goodman, the senior vice president of the taxpayer-watch group, the White Coat Waste Project. In his remarks, Goodman disclosed new jaw-dropping evidence obtained by the organization that proved tax dollars were being used at the National Institutes of Health to make mice transgender and torture puppies.
“Based on government documents, we estimate that over $20 billion a year of taxpayers’ money is wasted on ineffective and inhumane tests on tens of millions of puppies, kittens and other animals in the U.S. and in hundreds of foreign laboratories,” Goodman said.
“We’ve also recently identified over $240 million in NIH grants for transgender animal experiments, including $26 million in active funding,” he continued. “Some of these tests examine the effects of sex party drugs or the impact of hormones used for human gender transitions on the size and shape of lab animals’ genitals. Guess where 95% of this funding came from? Dr. Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.”
For obvious reasons, Goodman’s testimony spread like wildfire, receiving national media attention and leading to constituent demands that Congress cut these expenditures.
Most Americans have no idea their taxes are regularly being used to torture animals, though awareness has increased since Fauci’s illegal funding of gain-of-function research entered the public consciousness. Not only is the government torturing animals, they’re carrying out experiments that risk public health and are entirely unnecessary. Thus, the outrage many felt at this latest discovery was perfectly understandable and nearly universal.
But something strange has been happening in the intervening weeks. A media campaign to “fact check” the White Coat Waste Project’s findings and misconstrue the evidence has been unrolling in a way that feels, dare I say, coordinated?
Take this segment from notorious government propagandist Jimmy Kimmel. After President Donald Trump cited the reports regarding transgender mice during a congressional address, Kimmel opened his show by saying, “The government spent money on transgenic mice, which are genetically modified mice they use in lab tests to study disease. That has nothing to do with being transgender, other than the trans part of the word.”
Other outlets such as Forbes, Rolling Stone, and Snopes rushed to pile on, running pieces attempting to debunk the studies produced by WCW with similar arguments.
Here’s the problem. No one is arguing that transgenic mice are not used in scientific experiments. But elevating this topic is an intentional sleight of hand by these media pundits to confuse rank-and-file Americans and run cover for the agencies carrying out these insane and abusive animal experiments. We have the proof in writing that the government was working to transition mice, and their reasoning for doing so can hardly be linked to some altruistic cause, such as curing memory loss, as hacks, including Kimmel, have tried to claim.
The direct quotes from NIH-funded grants and NIH-funded peer-reviewed papers reporting transgender animal experiments include phrases such as the following:
“A transgender mouse model that allows for well-defined T cessation timing”
“gender affirming hormone therapy in a rodent model of the transfemale rat”
“Female mice were assigned to one of four experimental groups to mimic gender-affirming hormone therapy in human adolescents”
“We have developed a mouse model to mimic T treatment for FTM [female-to-male] gender transition”
“We will develop a mouse model of XHT (Cross-sex hormone therapy) that recapitulates clinical hormone therapy for male-to-female transition in humans”
I could keep going, but I trust readers get the point. To argue that these experiments did not pertain to transgender mice requires one to either be intentionally stupid or very easily misled. Either way, the fact that so many of these laughable “fact checks” made it into mainstream publications speaks volumes about the intellectual media vacuum we’re currently living in.
GOOD POLICY IS INFORMED BY SCIENCE, NOT DICTATED BY IT
Not only was all of this information easy to look into and verify, but the studies themselves are public records and can be found here, here, here, and here. It has become quite clear that what Democrats and their media puppets mean by “trust the science” is “refuse to read the science when it presents problems for your ideology.”
Taxpayers are sick of their dollars going to inhumane, unethical, and grotesque experiments on animals. Congress should be making every effort to cut off the mad scientists running rampant in our government and end these disgusting studies. And the public need to question why their media is so invested in ensuring this animal torture continues.
Hannah Cox (@HannahDCox) is the president and co-founder of BASEDPolitics and a fellow for the White Coat Waste Project.