“As director of NIH, you did sign off on these so-called scientific experiments. And as a dog lover, I want to tell you this is disgusting and evil. What you signed off on and these experiments that happened to beagles paid for by the American taxpayer. And I want you to know Americans don’t pay their taxes for animals to be tortured like this”
-Marjorie Taylor Greene to Anthony Fauci
Via Washington Post, November 19, 2021 (emphasis added):
“Anthony S. Fauci was swamped by so many angry messages and threats that in late October his assistant quit answering the phone for two weeks. The U.S. covid chief got 3,600 phone calls in 36 hours, just as he and other Biden administration officials were preparing for the campaign to vaccinate young children*…
The wave of anger grew out of a campaign by a little-known animal rights group called the White Coat Waste Project, which leveraged existing hostility among conservatives toward Fauci to further its cause, a Post review found. White Coat Waste has only a small fraction of the budget of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the nation’s most prominent animal-research opponent, but the group’s message was amplified by a right-wing echo chamber eager to thrash Fauci over everything from vaccine directives to NIH funding of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the Chinese city where the pandemic began.”
*How dare they interrupt the child-injection campaign!
Continuing:
“Much of the onslaught stemmed from a viral and false claim that the agency Fauci leads, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had funded a medical experiment in which beagles were trapped in mesh cages filled with diseased sand flies, according to four National Institutes of Health officials familiar with the calls. The outrage was supercharged by a bipartisan letter signed by 24 members of Congress that questioned the agency’s funding of medical research on dogs.”
“’The constant harassment in the form of ridiculous accusations and outright lies makes doing my job and that of my staff of fighting the covid-19 pandemic all the more difficult,’ Fauci, who also serves as President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in an interview with The Post. ‘This attack on me, which clearly has political overtones to a nonpolitical scientist, I feel, is dangerous to the entire field of science and [shows] how people try to intimidate scientists.’”
For a quick refresher, this “lie,” which the august and upright Washington Post now quietly concedes is actually totally true, was that Fauci greenlit research — through his agency, NIAID, personally signing off on — that consisted of trapping beagles’ heads in mesh cages while The Science™ unleashed flesh-eating insects on them. Then, to supplement the Mengele-tier cruelty, researchers cut their vocal cords out so they wouldn’t disturb The Science™ as it went about its important and morally commendable puppy torture in soothing silence.
Related: Fauci’s Puppy Abuse Scandal Gets New Legs?
Two and a half years later, after denying the Fauci puppy torture existed, the Washington Post finally got around to doing the bare basics of journalism.
Via Washington Post, June 7, 2024 (emphasis added):
“During the coronavirus hearing this week, Greene attacked Fauci as she held up a photo of two sedated puppies, their heads placed in mesh cages, as they lie on a table while being swarmed by sand flies. Outside the hearing, an ad truck commissioned by a group opposed to taxpayer-funded animal experiments circled Capitol Hill with billboards that showed Fauci together with this photo and directed people to a website called BeagleGate.org. The group, the White Coat Waste Project, is founded and run by people with links to conservative-leaning organizations, The Washington Post has reported.
When we first saw Greene hold up the photo, we figured this would be easy to debunk — another in a string of misleading attacks against Fauci, who became the public face of the government’s response to the pandemic.
After all, when this first became an issue in 2021 — unrelated to covid then as it is now but part of a general effort among conservatives to discredit Fauci in any way possible — a raft of fact checks noted that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said the study in question, conducted in Tunisia, had been attributed in error to the agency that Fauci ran, a division of NIH. The scientific journal that published the study issued a correction. NIH said that it did fund a study in Tunisia involving dogs and sand flies.
But it’s more complicated than that, a review of NIH emails and documents obtained by the group since 2021 under the Freedom of Information Act suggests. Some of the documents call into question NIH’s statements at the time, part of what appears to be a bungled public relations response…
The Tunisian sand fly study pictured in the photo was published on July 27, 2021, in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The study described how the beagles, between 6 and 8 months old, and obtained from the kennels of the Pasteur Institute of Tunis, were sedated and then exposed to hundreds of sand flies that had been deprived of food for 24 hours.”
Ladies and gentlemen, we got ‘em! The credibility of a multi-million dollar so-called news outfit ruined by the work of a handful of donation-driven activists at the WCW doing the Lord’s work.
Imagine that in this, our Sacred Democracy™ a corporate news outlet owned and bankrolled by arguably the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, with billions at his disposal to pour into investigative journalism, not only doesn’t do any legwork on a story it’s reporting on — a task which falls to a bootstrapped independent like WCW — but goes out of its way to smear and discount and important and true exposé, an effort that had the intended effect of protecting a corrupt government bureaucrat.
And the Washington Post would have us believe this was all a good-faith mix-up.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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