Dr. Anthony Fauci’s office received thousands of angry phone calls in as part of the fallout from the reports that his division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded cruel experiments involving beagle puppies, prompting his assistant to ignore calls for two weeks.
In October, reports surfaced accusing Fauci’s division of the NIH of partially funding an experiment, which involved allowing hungry, diseased sandflies to eat beagle puppies alive.
According to the White Coat Waste Project, investigators found Fauci’s division “shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive.”
“They also locked beagles alone in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies,” the organization added.
Days later, the taxpayer watchdog, obtaining documents through FOIA, found that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) also funded an experiment which involved injecting puppies with a mutant bacteria and allowing hundreds of ticks to feast upon them.
In one 36-hour period in October, Fauci’s office received 3,600 phone calls. According to the Washington Post, “his assistant quit answering the phone for two weeks.”
“You worthless piece of shit, you should be put in prison. Torturing animals!” one of the angry callers said in a voicemail, obtained by the Post. “I’d like to take you out in the sand, tie you down, put them fleas all over your ass.”
“When you take those little beagle puppies and you torment them and treat them like they’re trash, we’re not putting up with it,” another said. “I wouldn’t take this vaccine from that man for nothing after I saw this.”
“You have killed billions of people, and now you’re killing animals,” another caller said. “Your sick treatment of those beagles, you need to be dealt with.”
However, the Post, seemingly going to bat for the White House chief medical adviser, asserted that the first claim — that Fauci’s division of the NIH partially funded the first cruel experiment involving sandflies — is false, attributing to an “error by scientists”:
Initially, the researchers mistakenly listed NIAID as a funder when they published a paper in a scientific journal in late July. The journal issued a correction Oct. 26, when the agency flagged the mistake to the researchers amid the deluge of angry phone calls.
White Coat Waste spokesman Justin Goodman, however, does not buy the supposed correction, calling it “too convenient.”
Fauci, meanwhile, has complained to the Post, deeming the criticisms “ridiculous.”
“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 told 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,” he added.
This would not be the first time Fauci has suggested that people criticizing him are criticizing science itself. In June, Fauci said the criticisms lodged against him, in regards to the coronavirus pandemic, were “really very much an attack on science.”
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