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 is currently a leading medical advisor to President Joe Biden and director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. 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 previously stated that he would be retiring if Trump (who made Fauci a household name) returned to the Oval Office.
” We’re following a pattern. If somebody says, ‘You’ll leave when we don’t have [Chinese coronavirus] anymore,’ then I will be 105. Fauci stated, “I think that we will be living with it.”
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.
Fauci spoke about retiring from public life as demands for his termination have grown louder this week. https://t.co/I9DmaO3HF4
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) March 18, 2022
“The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has harmed many animals under his leadership, Guillermo said. Fauci must be replaced immediately by a progressive leader, who will acknowledge that animal experiments have failed and use modern research methods relevant to humans, like those described in the PETA researchers’ Research Modernization Deal .”
PETA have been advocating against the use of animals in medical research for many years. This is both because they are morally wrong and because they do not produce any significant medical advancements. 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 not created a vaccine to protect humans against HIV infection. PETA is asking for your support .”
to stop this madness
The experiments involved infusing other primates 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.
Americans have had it with Anthony Fauci and want him to resign. https://t.co/2SClLiSJjX
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) January 22, 2022
“Experimenters developed many vaccines. Five of the dozens of vaccines have made it to human testing, but none have succeeded. PETA recalls that one of the experiments even raised the risk of HIV infection in people.” PETA said. This was due to primate experiments using a different virus called simian immune deficiency virus (SIV) because animals are not able to contract HIV.
The NIH umbrella organization, which administers Fauci’s NIAID has faced much outrage over taxpayer-funded experiments conducted on dogs and pups. One such experiment involved injecting cocaine into beagle puppies. After the White Coat Waste Project, a non-profit group, requested details of the experiment through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Congress started investigating the reports of beagle research in February. Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa, led the congressional investigation into the allegations. She sent Fauci a request for clarification.
Fauci replied to the letter by saying that “no experiments using the canine model” are being carried out under the contract. This refers to nearly $2 million in government contracts which appeared to be directed at dog experiments concerning hay fever. In her letter, Ernst stated that the contract suggested the experiments would be conducted on “dogs as well as other animals.” Fauci addressed only dogs.
PETA’s Guillermo denounces the NIH for its cruel animal experiments since 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 is whether our money has been spent or not. She explained that experiments were “a fantastic way to make some money, but it is a lot less than actually doing good science that could help people .”
Guillermo discussed the “research modernization project” PETA referred to in its Monday press release. Guillermo also offered an exit strategy from the Fauci-supervised animal experiments.
” The strategy basically states that if something doesn’t work we should stop doing it. For other research areas where it’s not clear, we should evaluate them fairly. We need to stop funding what isn’t working and invest in what works. This is common sense, but the NIH needs to be taught .”
common sense.
“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 retiring. Fauci told the Hill that he was not retiring on Tuesday.
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