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Taxpayer, thank you!
We covered our rapid response fund in the nick of time. Now. we’ll keep the
pressure on the Environmental Protection Agency. More to come.
White Coat Waste is a Project to get the U.S. government out of the animal
testing business at home and abroad. We’re the watchdog who exposed how NIH
funded the Wuhan Lab—taxpayer-funded animal testing that almost certainly caused
COVID.
But Wuhan isn’t alone. Washington wastes your money on animal testing all around
the world.
So, I just wrote this new op-ed in Newsweek with Senator Eric Schmitt. Hot off the press, here’s our new plan to clean it up.
You Give. We Win. They Survive.
GIVE >>
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Originally published by Newsweek
[[link removed]] | December 14, 2023
Written by Eric Schmitt & Anthony Bellotti
U.S. Senator from Missouri; president and founder of government watchdog White
Coat Waste Project
Any time the United States is funding something overseas, it needs to be met
with strict oversight to ensure accountability, transparency, and accordance of
U.S. law. Unfortunately, it has come to light that this is not at all the case
for overseas projects captained by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A
legally-questionable and dangerous loophole has allowed the NIH to ship billions
of taxpayers' dollars to risky and inhumane animal testing laboratories in
foreign countries—including China and Russia—with absolutely no oversight.
It is abhorrent and categorically dangerous to not only outsource animal testing
overseas to countries that don't have civilized testing regulations, but to do
so with two of the United States' most hostile adversaries.
That is exactly why we're working together to pass the bipartisan Worldwide
Animal Testing Compliance and Harmonization Act, otherwise known as the WATCH
Act, to close this reckless NIH foreign lab loophole and protect public health,
tax dollars, and animal welfare.
Long-standing U.S. federal law clearly states that all animal testing labs
receiving NIH funding must undergo inspections, keep detailed records, and
report animal welfare and biosafety violations. These labs must also maintain
oversight committees that review, approve, and monitor all animal experiments to
ensure compliance with the law, prevent animal abuse, and avoid wasteful
spending on unnecessary projects.
However, the NIH has quietly been avoiding these federal laws by conducting
animal testing in foreign countries that are completely exempt from all
oversight required of animal labs here at home.
The worst-case scenario of this oversight blind spot came to a head in Wuhan,
China in late 2019 and led to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci's National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID) sent taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for
outrageously risky gain-of-function experiments on "humanized mice"—which would
have violated federal law in the U.S.–and made bat coronaviruses more contagious
and deadly to humans.
Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan
as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins
of the COVID-19 coronavirus make a visit to the institute in Wuhan in China's
central Hubei province on February 3, 2021.
Officials from the State Department and other agencies had warned for years that
the Wuhan lab was doing dangerous coronavirus research and was ill-equipped to
prevent an accident or misuse of research for military purposes. Nevertheless,
Fauci repeatedly ignored the warnings, never investigated, and kept the money
flowing. Now, it is widely believed–including by the FBI and Energy
Department–that this perilous, NIH-funded animal lab is what sparked the COVID
pandemic.
Unfortunately, the Wuhan lab isn't the start nor the end to this madness. The
NIH currently authorizes 348 animal labs in 54 foreign countries to receive
taxpayer dollars specifically for animal experiments. The NIH's list includes dozens of animal labs in China, even some with links to
the Chinese Communist Party, and it's still giving Wuhan lab collaborator
EcoHealth Alliance millions of tax dollars for virus-hunting, bat round-ups, and
lab animal experiments abroad. Not only is this an incredibly inhumane way to
put animals at risk, avoid U.S. law, and disregard transparency, but it is also
an egregious misuse of Americans' tax dollars.
Altogether, a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit released earlier
this year found that the NIH sent $2.2 billion from 2011 to 2021 to 200
different foreign labs in 44 countries. The GAO also found that Dr. Fauci's
NIAID was responsible for over three-quarters of the NIH's wasteful spending in
overseas animal labs. It is impossible to overstate the significance of bringing
accountability and transparency to this outright avoidance of the law and
blatantly wasteful spending.
The GAO confirmed that NIH does not require foreign animal labs to abide by U.S.
laws and policies and that it has never inspected a foreign animal lab in its
38-plus years of oversight authority. The NIH does not even require foreign
animal labs to report abuses and violations and has no system to verify the
accuracy of any information received from foreign animal labs.
The WATCH Act would, among other things, require U.S. funded-foreign labs to
undergo quarterly inspections, establish oversight committees, keep detailed
records, give the public access to compliance records, and cut funding from
noncompliant labs.
Foreign animal testing labs that receive U.S. taxpayer dollars should not get a
free pass to waste money, abuse animals, and perform dangerous experiments with
no oversight , and this bill would ensure these grotesque practices are not allowed to
continue.
The WATCH Act is a commonsense solution to ensure the law is upheld, and that
the U.S. government does not ship billions of tax dollars to foreign animal
testing labs with no transparency or accountability.
Eric Schmitt represents Missouri in the U.S. Senate. Anthony Bellotti lives in
St. Louis and is the president and founder of government watchdog White Coat
Waste Project.
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[[link removed]]Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to pay $20 billion+ for wasteful government animal experiments.
Read our Blog [[link removed]]
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Make A Donation
[[link removed]]
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White Coat Waste Project (WCW) is a 501(c)(3) government watchdog. Contributions
are tax-deductible.
PO Box 26029, Washington, DC 20001
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