Commentary
In May, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) did something extraordinary. The agency
quietly scrubbed the Wuhan Institute of Virology from its list of preapproved labs that can receive U.S. tax dollars to conduct animal testing.
The Wuhan lab is, of course, noteworthy because an abundance of evidence suggests that
it was likely the source of SARS-CoV-2.
That the Wuhan lab was receiving millions of dollars from the NIH to conduct risky research on coronaviruses helps explain why the U.S. government worked
so hard to convince people that COVID-19 was of a natural origin. It also explains why the NIH would erase the Wuhan lab from its list of labs that can receive funding—without even issuing a statement.
Unfortunately, the NIH’s damage control isn’t just too late, it’s also far too little.
White Coat Waste Project—the organization that
exposed the fact that the NIH was funding the gain-of-function research of the Chinese lab researcher who’s reportedly believed to be “patient zero”—recently noted that dozens of other Chinese laboratories that conduct animal testing remain eligible to receive U.S. tax dollars.
“Shipping taxpayer dollars to animal testing labs run by our foreign adversaries is a recipe for disaster,” White Coat Waste Project Senior Vice President Justin Goodman said in a
statement. “Over 70 percent of taxpayers—Republicans and Democrats alike—oppose this reckless spending.”
There’s a reason that Americans overwhelmingly oppose taxpayer funding for animal testing: The practice is ethically questionable and often gruesome.
In 2021, CBS
reported on a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs program that funded experiments on healthy cats, including a procedure called a “head implant” that involved researchers “drilling holes” into the skulls of cats “to test for sleep patterns.”
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, these grisly experiments caught the attention of federal lawmakers, including Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa),
who said more than $1 billion of federal funds has been spent on animal testing programs and other projects in China and Russia alone.
Ms. Ernst is one of a bipartisan group of lawmakers who want to end this funding with the Accountability in Foreign Animal Research (AFAR) Act.
“The AFAR Act will guarantee not another penny will be spent subsidizing crazy and dangerous experiments, like putting cats on a treadmill or enhancing bat coronaviruses in Russia and China, ever again,” she said.
Ms. Ernst is right, and the AFAR Act is a step in the right direction. But the problem goes beyond tax dollars.
There’s a dark, Frankenstein-like aspect to researchers who would use such ethically compromised practices to advance humanity’s fortunes in the name of science. The lesson of Frankenstein, of course, is that we should beware of committing moral atrocities in the pursuit of science. Yet this lesson appears lost on many scientists today—or, at least, those who are receiving the checks.
And this gets to the deeper problem. The government isn’t merely allowing these ethically questionable experiments on animals to occur; it’s actively funding the research, which is problematic for two reasons that go beyond dollars and cents.
First, government has created a massive industry around animal experimentation. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, and both the recipients of the funds and those who grant them have an incentive to keep the cash flowing—regardless of the ethics or the fruit born of the research.
Second, proper oversight and accountability of these facilities are hampered by the fact that the government is funding the research. The government is supposed to hold to account those who directly harm others, but the Wuhan lab saga shows how difficult this task becomes when the government itself is the bad actor.
Neither the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which administers the Wuhan Institute of Virology and reports directly to the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, nor the U.S. government has shown much interest in being transparent about what was going on at the Wuhan lab.
The U.S. government, meanwhile, went to great lengths to censor Americans who openly speculated that the virus might have originated in the Wuhan lab. Government officials also somehow convinced a bunch of scientists
to publicly claim that the virus was of a natural origin, even though they privately believed that the opposite was true.
In other words, government officials will be more inclined to cover up the truth than to hold themselves accountable for any crimes they commit or harm they cause.
None of this should surprise us. In his classic work “
Anatomy of the State,” the economist Murray Rothbard noted that “the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects.” Rothbard proposed testing this hypothesis with a simple question: “Which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely—those against private citizens or those against itself?”
We’ve seen the answer to this question again and again in the past three years, which is why it’s clear that it’s time for the government to get out of the business of funding animal experiments altogether.
The state’s long track record of horrifying scientific experiments—on both
people and
animals—shows that it lacks both the conscience and the incentives necessary to conduct such research ethically (assuming that it can ever be ethical) and safely.
In the end, both our grandchildren and the animal kingdom will thank us for separating science and state.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
