EXCLUSIVE – PETA President Celebrates Fauci Goodbye: Poisoned, Conducted ‘Transgender Experiments’ on Animals

The president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Ingrid Newkirk, told Breitbart News on Tuesday that it was “high time” medical personality Anthony Fauci resigned from his government positions and lamented that Fauci had presided over “transgender experiments on animals which make no sense at all.”

Newkirk’s organization was hosting a party on Tuesday outside the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in Washington, D.C., in response to Fauci announcing that he would step down as leftist President Joe Biden’s top medical adviser and as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in December. Fauci ran the NIAID, an agency under the National Institutes of Health (NIH), for 38 years.

In a letter published on Monday, the 81-year-old Fauci insisted, “I am not retiring.”

His departure from the NIH was nonetheless a cause for celebration for PETA, which has condemned the NIH for its use of animals in medical experimentation for decades. As head of the NIAID, PETA activists note, Fauci was in charge of approving many of these experiments. PETA dubbed Fauci a “dinosaur” for approving what it deemed outdated methods of scientific research that involved the gruesome torture of animals; to celebrate his stepping down, PETA activists in dinosaur costumes and party hats danced and cheered outside of the HHS headquarters on Tuesday.

“You are a dinosaur and it’s high time you left,” Newkirk said to Fauci in remarks to Breitbart News. “You have never met an animal you didn’t want to experiment on and neither had your boss, Dr. Collins.”

Francis Collins, the former head of the NIH, resigned in October 2021 after being accused of making false statements regarding gain-of-function research – in which viruses are altered, sometimes to improve their ability to infect humans or the severity of the disease they cause – at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.

Newkirk said Fauci’s departure could become a “new era” for both the NIH and HHS generally that departs from the use of animal torture to develop medical technology, calling for “research modernization.”

“Dr. Fauci has poisoned animals, he’s put beagles in tents with insects all over their heads, he’s had transgender experiments on animals which make no sense at all,” Newkirk detailed.

Newkirk referred to an experiment funded by the NIH allegedly meant to study HIV in transgender women that attempted to “transition” male monkeys and then experiment on them to simulate studies on human transgender women.

“The idea by the experimenter who’s at Scripps Research in Florida is to study HIV transmission among transgender women,” PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo explained to Breitbart News in January, “but instead of actually working with transgender women, which could be done humanely and non-invasively and would yield results that actually mean something, he has chosen to take male monkeys and give them hormones so that he can ‘feminize’ them and they become models for transgender women.”

“Beyond the obvious absurdity of trying to create a transgender monkey, monkeys don’t even contract HIV,” Guillermo observed at the time.

PETA has regularly made the case that studies on animals have not yielded enough medical or other scientific breakthroughs to justify their continued existence.

Fauci personally came under fire last year after the revelation of experiments on beagles, many of them puppies, that animal rights groups denounced as cruel. While PETA, a nonpartisan organization, was among the organizations denouncing the NIH and Fauci, “fact-checkers” blamed “conservative” advocates for calling for an end to the experiments in question, partially because Republican lawmakers in Congress called for investigations into the experiments. In particular, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Rand Paul (R-KY), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Mike Braun (R-IN), and Susan Collins (R-ME) wrote to Fauci last year asking him to explain experiments involving “force-feeding or injecting 44 beagle puppies aged 6-8 months old with an experimental drug before killing and dissecting them,” among other atrocities.

The revelations regarding beagle experiments were first revealed by the White Coat Waste project, a scientific advocacy group, last year, including the experiment involving drugging beagle puppies. Another experiment reportedly involved having insects eat beagles alive, as Newkirk referenced on Tuesday. The NIAID has denied funding an experiment in Tunisia in which this occurred.

“From brazenly bankrolling beagle torture to foolishly funding gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan animal lab and lying to lawmakers about it, Anthony Fauci is the poster child for waste, fraud and abuse,” White Coat Waste Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy Justin Goodman said this week following Fauci’s announcement that he would step down. “Retirement won’t get Fauci off the hook and we’ll continue to work to hold him accountable for decades of abusing his authority, taxpayers and animals with impunity.”