(1) Find. (2) Expose. (3) Defund.

Taxpayer, F.E.D. is White Coat Waste Project’s winning campaign formula and “secret sauce.”  It ABSOLUTELY MUST be followed in this precise order. It’s a rigid, 3-step process: 

1. Find: First, we find government waste. Through hard-hitting investigations that include tracking federal payouts and filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we uncover wasteful spending on cruel animal tests.
    
2. Expose: Then, we expose government waste.  We alert Congress, the media, and the public with aggressive advertising campaigns. 
    
3. Defund: Finally, we defund government waste. We work with members of Congress on both side of the aisle to cut the spending and retire the survivors! 

We are currently in the ‘Expose’ phase of our emergency campaign to cancel the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) new painful cat test at Stokes VA Medical Center and save the “Stokes 7” kittens – and it’s working. 

Media outlets around the country are reporting on this egregious misuse of our tax dollars, and as a result, thousands of taxpayers are joining our fight.  

I’ve included one of those articles below – Taxpayer, please take a read and then share with 10 people in your network! 

Avery Kron Campaign Assistant White Coat Waste Project

P.S. Taxpayer, your continued advocacy is urgently needed!

Once you’ve finished reading, please follow this secure link to send a pre-written email to VA Sec. McDonough urging him to cancel his plans for a new painful cat test and retire the “Stokes 7” kittens.

Contact Congress >>

Will the VA Proceed with Experiments on Cats?

Originally published by The Post & Email | July 29th 2023

The White Coat Waste Project (WCW), a 501(c)3 organization based in Washington, DC launched just over four years ago which played a major role in exposing the United States government’s funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) where the SARS-COV-2 virus may have originated, is intent on preventing the resumption of any animal experiments by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) which in the past cost taxpayers millions of dollars and resulted in dead cats.

WCW is the group which revealed approximately two years ago that beagles were undergoing what the organization said was taxpayer-funded “torture” via funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), then led by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.

“In August 2021, as part of our #BeagleGate series of exposés, White Coat Waste Project (WCW) revealed that taxpayers had paid $375,000 for experiments in Tunisia, where beagles were bitten again and again and again by infectious sand flies,” the report begins. “In one test, beagles were drugged and locked in cages full of hungry flies. In another, dogs were stuck in cages outside overnight and used as fly bait.”

Three military laboratories which had conducted experiments on cats, including the Louis Stokes Cleveland Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, are now defunct, WCWP reports as a result of its advocacy, but that VA Secretary Denis McDonough “wants more.”

Formerly White House chief of staff to Barack Obama, McDonough, who has no military service, was nominated by Joe Biden almost immediately after he took office and confirmed as VA secretary on February 8, 2021.

“WCW’s investigation uncovered this image from the VA’s proposal to conduct a new painful & wasteful taxpayer-funded experiment on cats,” its recent report states, below which is a diagram the group obtained through a FOIA request claiming the need for “7 cats.”

The plan calls for the felines to undergo “surgery and implantation” of an “HD (high density) connector” to test the device’s “stability in the presence of motion and muscle activity.” The purpose of the proposed experiment, McDonough wrote in a June 6, 2022 letter to Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), who was then chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies, was to determine if the device would prove helpful to “Veteran stroke survivors, as well as those who have experienced a lower limb or hand amputation.”

The VA is currently in a five-year spin-down period to “eliminate or reduce the use of canines, felines and primates” in experiments, 8News reported in June 2021. However, at the same time, the outlet added it had discovered “that McGuire Medical Center purchased 27 dogs in the last 12 months to be used in ongoing fatal experiments.”

“Currently, no lab at the VA or other federal agency is abusing cats in painful experiments,” WCWP’s post continues. “WCW shut them all down. McDonough’s plan would restart the U.S. government’s only painful cat test.”

“Sec. McDonough claimed in his letter last year to Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) that this cat experiment is mandated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and federal law,” WCWP further wrote. “But the FDA has never required cat testing, and last year we successfully worked with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and other members of Congress to overturn the outdated FDA animal testing red tape mandate cited by the VA. The entire basis for the VA and Sec. McDonough’s request for this cat experiment is now dubious, yet the project is still being planned.”

In an undated article from a hard-copy edition, Steven Dinan of The Washington Times reported that in response to McDonough’s request and report to the subcommittee, “The lawmakers have asked Mr. McDonough to reconsider his decision, saying there are other ways to meet the Food and Drug Administration’s requirements for bringing new products to the market without having to resort to ‘cruel’ testing.”

In a related successful endeavor, on April 2, 2019, WCWP reported that “the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has just announced it is ending all cat experiments and adopting out the 14 cats remaining at its laboratory. The news comes just two weeks after WCW released its report exposing the USDA’s kitten cannibalism experiments using cats and dogs purchased from meat markets in China.”

That reference was to a March 19, 2019 post in which WCWP wrote, “As first reported by NBC News, and covered by the Washington Post, Newsweek, Time& and scores of other outlets, a new report released by White Coat Waste Project found that the USDA has been using our tax dollars to buy live cats and dogs from meat markets in China, as well as round up stray animals and pets in other foreign countries, kill them, and feed their remains to kittens at the USDA’s lab in Beltsville, Maryland. The report also documents in detail how the USDA’s expensive kitten experiments are outdated, wasteful, and unnecessary, and how the USDA has made false claims to Congress and the media.”

The USDA was studying the progression of toxoplasmosis, a disease contracted from food contaminated with the toxoplasma gondii organism which can affect humans and, in extreme cases, lead to serious outcomes.

Subsequent to the media exposure, Congress condemned the practices involving cats, and the USDA announced “its toxoplasmosis research has been redirected and the use of cats as part of any research protocol in any ARS laboratory has been discontinued and will not be reinstated.”

Despite its decision to discontinue the program, the statement maintains, “The agency’s research in this area has borne undeniable results – including helping to cut the prevalence of T. gondii by as much as 50 percent in the United States.”

Uninfected cats would be made available for adoption, USDA said, a policy WCWP has lauded.

In a post dated September 24, 2021, WCWP Digital Director Amanda Nieves reported:

Congress is continuing to crack down on funding for the entities responsible for dangerous coronavirus experiments on bats and humanized mice that may have caused the pandemic.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives both passed legislation that defunds the Wuhan Animal Lab.

Approximately two months later, a prohibition on funding to EcoHealth Alliance, which coordinated on lab experiments at the WIV, was instituted in the National Defense Authorization bill, The Washington Times reported. At that time, the article states, the U.S. Defense Department had conveyed “nearly $40 million” to EcoHealth “for research.”

On its website as of this writing, EcoHealth prominently displays the question, “Who stands between you and the next pandemic?” with emphasis on the word “you.” The group also sports a section titled, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”

It was WCWP which, through FOIA requests and a subsequent lawsuit, released documentation showing that NIAID personnel were aware that EHA could be conducting embargoed gain-of-function research, yet the agency turned to EHA to determine if its proposed activity constituted such research. After EHA denied its proposal would encompass gain-of-function research, NIAID approved funding of $3.7 million.

Fauci and his deputy, Lawrence Tabak, blamed EHA and the WIV for any deviations from the ban on GOF research, The Daily Caller reported in an exclusive based on WCWP’s discoveries.

On June 15, 2023, WCWP released additional documentation it obtained pointing to the “lead experimenter” at the WIV, Ben Hu, to have been the first person known to have contracted the SARS-COV-2 virus in late 2019. “If Ben Hu is patient zero, then this WCW FOIA investigation reveals the origin of COVID,” the group reported.

On July 17, 2023, HHS issued a nine-page memorandum indicating funding to the WIV would be suspended for ten years as well as recommended for permanent “debarment,” citing reports, correspondence, previous grants, federal law and the agency’s own 2017 guidelines. The detailed memo provides a timeline revealing how EcoHealth Alliance was awarded money which went to the Wuhan lab and how the ban on “gain-of-function” research would be lifted to allow for a “special term and condition” (pp. 4-5).

The work done in Wuhan, facilitated by EcoHealth and the NAIAD, was deemed to fall outside of the “special term and condition” in its 2019 renewal (Grant Number 2R01AI110964-06), the memo states, although applied retroactively to its inception in 2014.

The proposed work in the renewal application for Grant Number 2R01AI110964-06 was to investigate more divergent animal viruses, and NIAID determined that the HHS P3CO policies did not apply to the work proposed under the competitive renewal application. As such, the NoA for Grant Number 2R01AI110964-06 did not include the special term and condition in Section IV. Although NIAID determined that the work under 2R01AI110964-06 was ultimately not subject to either to the GoF pause or the HHS P3CO policies, the special term and condition was included for the remainder of the original competitive segment of the award, which was from June 1, 2014 through May 31, 2019. Accordingly, the special term and condition cited to above in paragraph 11 was applicable to the grant as revised in R01AI110964-03 through the grant renewal period corresponding to 5R01AI110964-05. After processing the grant renewal 2R01AI110964-06, the NIH performed routine grant administration activities and monitoring.

On February 23, 2021, 28 members of Congress wrote to Kristi Grimm, Principal Deputy Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), requesting “a prompt and thorough investigation into the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) response to biosafety concerns raised about taxpayer-funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China,” citing a February 5, 2021 editorial board column in The Washington Post posing the possibility that the novel coronavirus could have originated at the WIV lab.

“The NIH, unfortunately, has played a major role in supporting WIV and this treacherous research and the promotion of spurious claims dismissing the NIH-funded lab’s potential role in the COVID-19 pandemic,” the congressmen asserted in their letter to Grimm, which continues:

In 2017, NIH Director Francis Collins personally supported and celebrated the resumption of dangerous taxpayer-funded “gain-of-function” research designed to make viruses more transmissible and fatal.⁷ Subsequently, Dr. Collins’ NIH allowed U.S. Taxpayer dollars to be secretively funneled to WIV’s reckless coronavirus experiments through grants awarded to the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance, Inc.^8,9 The Pentagon also apparently funded WIV via a grant to EcoHealth.¹⁰

In a May 2022 article, Buzzfeed News reported:

As much of the United States entered COVID lockdowns in April 2020, a tiny group that campaigns against federal funding for animal experiments spotted an opportunity.

Speculation was swirling in right-leaning media that the virus behind the pandemic had emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, rather than from wildlife sold for food in the city’s markets. As it happened, the White Coat Waste Project had been looking into taxpayer money going to labs in China, including in Wuhan. The group’s founder had strong contacts with Republican politicians and had launched the group with the mission of getting conservatives into animal activism.

…The White Coat Waste Project sprung into action, persuading DailyMail.com to run a story saying the US government had funded the lab. Then all hell broke loose.

Then-president Donald Trump, keen to blame China for the pandemic, was soon involved. After prodding from the conservative outlet Newsmax at a press conference, his administration terminated the grant from the National Institutes of Health, which had been awarded to a New York–based nonprofit called the EcoHealth Alliance.

In March 2022, WCWP was instrumental in convincing Congress to defund a Russian lab which had conducted invasive and destructive cat experiments with U.S. tax dollars even as the war between Russia and Ukraine raged on.

On Thursday The Post & Email sent a list of questions via the “contact” email address provided, receiving a reply Friday from Justin Goodman, WCWP Senior Vice President, Advocacy and Public Policy:

1. Do the experiments Secretary McDonough has authorized on animals have an identifiable purpose?
According to documents obtained via WCW’s Freedom of Information Act investigation, the VA wants to waste tax money on illegal and wasteful cat experiments to test the durability of a wiring connector for a medical device, even though federal law restricts government spending on VA cat testing, there are alternatives available and cat testing is not required by law.

2. How long have they been going on in the military, whether or not under McDonough’s authorization?

The VA has been crippling, maiming, and otherwise abusing cats in cruel and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments for nearly 60 years. When we launched our campaign to shut them down in 2019, the VA was tormenting and killing 30 cats a year in painful experiments that involved damaging their brains, severing their spinal cords, and forcing them to walk on treadmills. As of last year, following our investigations, lobbying and grassroots pressure from taxpayers across the country, the VA ended its painful testing on cats in Los Angeles, Louisville, and Cleveland and had no cats at all in its labs. Secretary McDonough took office in 2021 and is now personally trying to reverse our progress and torture cats in wasteful experiments again.

Our successful work to create a VA lab animal adoption policy also led to the retirement of some of the survivors, like the Stokes Sisters. We’re proud to be the only group that has ever shut down a government cat lab.

3. Has Congress approved the money being spent this way?

The VA’s plan to restart its cat testing is cruel, wasteful and illegal. We’ve helped enact historic, first-of-its-kind bipartisan legislation restricting funding for the VA’s experiments on cats (and dogs and primates) and directing the agency to phase them out by 2025 (a measure Congress re-upped last month). Federal law states that the VA cannot spend taxpayer dollars on painful cat testing save for rare circumstances when no alternatives are available, which is absolutely not the case here.

4. Without revealing sources, how did you obtain the footage of the experiments on the cats? Were you the party who discovered the experiments on the beagles last year?

We obtained the footage of Cleveland’s cat experiments through a Freedom of Information Act investigation.

White Coat Waste Project was the first group to uncover the VA’s painful testing on dogs and cats and were leading the campaign to permanently defund them. Our viral Beaglegate campaign was also the first to exposé the NIH’s painful taxpayer-funded experiments in which puppies are debarked, injected with cocaine, and infested with biting insects. We’re now leading a national campaign to end that cruel spending too!

On Saturday we contacted a VA spokesman to request comment on McDonough’s plan to restart cat experiments but did not hear back by press time.

Thanks for reading, Taxpayer!

Please follow this secure link to send a pre-written email to VA Sec. McDonough urging him to cancel his plans for a new painful cat tests and spare the “Stokes 7” victims.

You can also call the VA directly at (202) 461-4861 or (216) 791-2300 ext. 64657.

Here are some helpful talking points:

1. Introduce yourself: As an American taxpayer, you should have a say in where your money goes!
    
2. Express your objection: Politely express your opposition to the new experiments. Explain why you don’t want to pay for these unnecessary and painful kitten tests.
    
3. Request immediate action: Demand Sec. McDonough to use his authority to halt this wasteful government spending once and for all!