People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) reacted to public health celebrity Anthony Fauci telling Politico that he would retire “by the end of President Joe Biden’s term” on Monday by demanding he “leave now” and condemning him for leading experiments that gruesomely harmed “millions of animals.”
Fauci currently serves as a top medical adviser to leftist President Joe Biden and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). While he was a fixture in American public health leadership for decades, President Donald Trump made him a television celebrity in response to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic in 2020, where he starred in daily broadcasts with the president for months.
The television fixture told Politico in an interview published this week that he expected Biden to be the last president he served, stating it was impossible for him to wait until the Chinese coronavirus pandemic ended to step down. Fauci had previously claimed he would retire if Trump, who made him a household name, returned to the Oval Office.
“We’re in a pattern now. If somebody says, ‘You’ll leave when we don’t have [Chinese coronavirus] anymore,’ then I will be 105. I think we’re going to be living with this,” Fauci said.
PETA, which has vocally objected to government-funded animal experiments like those Fauci conducted at the NIAID for years, expressed exasperation with the 81-year-old Fauci choosing to remain indefinitely in a leadership position, even if hinting at retirement.
“PETA welcomes Anthony Fauci’s retirement announcement, but we have a suggestion: Leave now,” Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo said in a press release on Monday.
“Under his direction, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has harmed millions of animals, including tens of thousands of monkeys in failed AIDS experiments that have not produced a marketable vaccine to prevent HIV and dogs who have been subjected to hideous experiments,” Guillermo’s statement continued. “Fauci needs to make way immediately for a forward-thinking leader who will admit that experiments on animals have been an utter failure and implement modern, human-relevant research methods, such as those described in PETA scientists’ Research Modernization Deal.”
PETA has advocated against medical experiments that severely abuse animals for years – on the grounds that they are immoral as well as the fact that they have produced no significant medical advances. The failed AIDS monkey experiments reportedly began under Fauci in the 1980s, PETA has documented in the past, and were intended to create an HIV vaccine that would protect humans.
“The reliance of Fauci’s NIAID — part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — on monkey models has wasted almost 40 years and billions of taxpayers’ dollars and has resulted in little more than a pile of dead primates,” PETA denounced last year. “It has failed to create a vaccine that protects humans from HIV infection. PETA needs your help to end this insanity.”
The experiments in question involved injecting other primates with experimental HIV vaccines. NIH research has optimistically highlighted the vaccines in the past as having a mild positive effect in protecting the monkeys from AIDS, but no HIV vaccine for humans exists at press time and investment in treatment has yielded significant progress in helping patients manage a disease that was once, in recent memory, a death sentence.
“Experimenters have developed dozens of vaccines. Only five have gotten as far as human trials, and all of them have failed. One of them even increased the likelihood of HIV infection in humans,” PETA recalled, referring to the primate experiments that use a separate virus, simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), because the animals cannot contract HIV.
The NIH, the umbrella organization that administers Fauci’s NIAID, has also faced widespread outrage for taxpayer-funded experiments on pups and adult dogs, among them, reportedly, an experiment in which scientists injected beagle pups with cocaine. Congress began investigating reports of the beagle experiments in February after the White Coat Waste Project (WCW), a non-profit organization, obtained details of the experiments through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) led congressional efforts to investigate the revelations, sending a letter to Fauci demanding he explain the situation.
Fauci responded to the letter by confirming, “no experiments utilizing the canine model are being conducted under this contract,” referring to a nearly $2-million government contract that appeared directed towards dog experiments regarding hay fever. The Ernst noted in her letter that the contract indicated the experiments would involve “dogs and other animals;” Fauci only addressed the dogs.
PETA’s Guillermo has been denouncing the NIH for heinous animal experiments for years. In 2019, about a year before Fauci became a celebrity, Guillermo explained in an appearance on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight that the government agency was spending millions on cruel animal experiments with as high as a “90 percent failure rate.”
“The choice really is our money is wasted or our money is wasted, our money is put toward good science or our money isn’t,” she explained, later adding that the experiments are “a great way to make money – it’s a lot easier than doing really good science that might actually help people.”
In an interview with Breitbart News in January, Guillermo detailed the “research modernization” project that PETA referenced in its press release on Monday, offering an exit strategy out of the animal experiments Fauci supervised.
“The strategy is essentially: if we know it doesn’t work, stop doing it,” she explained. “And for other areas of research where we’re not sure, evaluate those fairly and stop what doesn’t work and fund what does work. It’s common sense and yet somehow NIH seems to need to have common sense put directly in front of them.”
“If you’ve got something that fails more than 90% of the time, and in some disease research areas it’s 100% failure — such as drugs developed using animals for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, AIDS, neurological diseases, strokes, and sepsis — and you’re spending 50% of your budget on that, that is just statistically illogical,” she concluded.
Update: Following the publication of this story, Fauci denied that his comments to Politico indicated that he was planning to retire.
“I’m not going to retire. No, no, I’m not going to retire,” Fauci said to the Hill on Tuesday.
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