Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a Senate hearing in Washington on May 11, 2021. Greg Nash/Pool/Getty Images
Americans have been horrified to learn about sadistic experiments on dogs funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), directed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
A group called the White Coat Waste Project, which is devoted to exposing and ending wasteful government spending on animal experimentation, reported that a lab in Tunisia conducted NIAID-funded experiments in which beagles were eaten alive by sandflies.
The hashtags #FireFauci and #FauciLiedDogsDied, dominated Twitter, and 24 lawmakers from both parties issued a letter calling for an immediate investigation.
As thousands marked their dogs “safe from Anthony Fauci” on social media, it seems that Fauci, known to be adroit in handling the press, has a public relations disaster on his hands. In addition, this publicity has shone a spotlight on the government-funded abuse of animals.
The Epoch Times’ Celia Farber spoke with Justin Goodman, vice president of White Coat Waste Project, on Oct. 25 about the organization’s role in exposing the scandal in Tunisia and also the funding of gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China.
The press office of NIAID, a part of the National Institutes of Health, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Epoch Times: How long has White Coat Waste Project existed?
Justin Goodman: Our campaigns were launched in 2016. White Coat Waste was founded by our president, Anthony Bellotti, who was a Republican strategist who had worked on other defund campaigns and actually worked in an animal laboratory in his past, and was so shocked and horrified by what he saw that he made the commitment to himself to start an organization to end that problem. In 2013, he started WCWP, and in 2016, we launched our first campaigns.
Justin Goodman, vice president of the White Coat Waste Project. courtesy Justin Goodman
The Epoch Times: What’s the latest development?
Mr. Goodman: Today, #FauciLiedDogsDied was the No. 1 trending hashtag on Twitter, so the campaign definitely caught fire again today, and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have been tweeting about it. Gov. Ron DeSantis gave a speech about Fauci’s abuse of dogs earlier today. It’s really been remarkable how this has really captured the hearts and minds of people across the country, of all political persuasions.
The Epoch Times: To those who ask, “Is it fair to tie this to Anthony Fauci himself as an individual?” what do you say?
Mr. Goodman: Absolutely. If he’s going to get credit for any good that he does, he also has to accept blame for the evil he does, and that’s what’s happening with these dog experiments. He’s funded a pattern of puppy abuse with our tax dollars.
The Epoch Times: He green lights them? NIH? NIAID?
Mr. Goodman: All of these experiments are conducted under NIAID. He is certainly responsible for them, just like he’s responsible for funding the lab in Wuhan, whether he personally approved that or not.
The Epoch Times: What was your role in the Wuhan lab funding story breaking open?
Mr. Goodman: As a taxpayer watchdog group, we’re committed to finding, exposing, and defunding—we like to use the acronym FED for that—taxpayer-funded animal experiments that waste about $20 billion each year. And in 2019, we started investigating animal experimentation funded by the NIH in foreign countries.
And when the pandemic—well, prior to the pandemic—when word started to circulate that the lab in Wuhan was potentially tied to the virus, we identified that the NIH had sent a grant of $600,000 to that laboratory, specifically for experiments with coronaviruses.
So we were the first organization to connect the NIH to the lab in Wuhan that is now at the center of speculation that it may have caused the pandemic with gain-of-function experiments.
The Epoch Times: The sadistic nature of these experiments on puppies—what do you think personally, do they enjoy inflicting pain, or do they make some rationale for the “science” of this?
Mr. Goodman: I just think that they got way too much money, and there’s a stunning lack of accountability and transparency how that money is being spent, so you have people who make careers torturing dogs, and it’s continued because Anthony Fauci has let it. The buck stops with him.
The Epoch Times: Will Fauci skate on this and just make it go away?
Mr. Goodman: I think this is the first time we have bipartisan anger directed at NIAID and Anthony Fauci, in this case for experimenting on dogs and abusing them with our tax dollars. We did polling last month that showed 70 percent of Democrats and over 60 percent of Republicans opposed these experiments and want them defunded.
And we have bipartisan members of Congress from across the spectrum who are demanding reforms as well. And when you look at other situations where there’s been controversy that he’s at the center of, it’s been pretty partisan. So the difference now is that the criticism is coming from both sides of the aisle.
The Epoch Times: How did you get all this? FOIA [Freedom of Information Act]?
Mr. Goodman: The most recent experiments we exposed that involved 6- to 8-month-old puppies having their vocal cords cut out, being debarked so they couldn’t make noise in the laboratory, and then being force-fed experimental drugs at a cost of $1.68 million dollars to taxpayers, we exposed that using the FOIA. We obtained those documents using FOIA.
The Epoch Times: When did those start to come back to you?
Mr. Goodman: We requested the documents in August 2021; we got them pretty quickly. Often, we have to sue the NIH. In this case, we didn’t have to sue them. We got the documents in September.
The Epoch Times: What were you asking for?
Mr. Goodman: We identified some suspect contracts on government-spending websites. And we asked for basically all of the protocols and documentation for any experiments on dogs connected with those contracts.
The Epoch Times: The heartbreaking photos of the dogs in mesh traps—I’ve seen that that took place in Georgia in the United States, and also I’ve seen Tunisia.
Mr. Goodman: There’s been a little confusion about that. We’ve exposed four different Fauci-funded dog experiments. That experiment was funded by NIAID, but it took place in Tunisia.
And that photo was from a paper that was published by NIAID-funded experimenters in Tunisia who took healthy puppies, sedated them, starved sandflies, and then locked the puppies’ heads in mesh cages and released the starving flies to basically bite the dogs and essentially eat them alive.
The Epoch Times: That photograph was published in a scientific journal?
Mr. Goodman: Yes.
The Epoch Times: It seems to me that photograph itself had a huge impact. It’s crushing.
Mr. Goodman: It puts a face to the horrible abuses that are being funded by our tax dollars by Anthony Fauci’s division at the NIH. We can describe to you all day long what goes on in these laboratories, but it’s different to see two puppies with their heads locked in cages where they’re being eaten alive by flies. I mean, that’s game-changing.
So some of our investigations involve whistleblowers giving us photographs, some of our investigations involve videos and photos we get through FOIA. And sometimes in a case like this, we get lucky and the experimenters themselves publish the worst of the worst.
The Epoch Times: What has it been like for you these past few days?
Mr. Goodman: I’ve been doing this work for 16 years and have never experienced a response as overwhelming as this from the public, from the media, or from Congress. I think this is going to be a pivotal moment in the history of the effort to end animal experimentation, and it certainly feels like that to me.
