Despite President Donald Trump’s Department of Veterans Affairs and Navy moving to end cruel animal testing, the National Institutes of Health, under Director Jay Bhattacharya, has renewed millions in funding for controversial experiments, including THC tests on monkeys at Harvard, tick bites on beagle puppies, and Anthony Fauci’s notorious “Monkey Island,” prompting criticism from watchdog group White Coat Waste.
Last month, Gateway Pundit reported how President Trump’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Doug Collins, confirmed the department will end primate testing before a 2026 deadline set by Congress.
Following years of campaigning by the watchdog organization White Coat Waste, President Trump’s first administration set the VA on the path to ending testing on dogs, cats and primates after WCW exposed how the agency was giving puppies heart attacks, injecting monkeys with angel dust, crippling kittens, drilling into cat’s skulls, and much more.
Also in May, Trump’s U.S. Navy banned all testing on dogs and cats. The Navy credited WCW, as well as journalist Laura Loomer, the Department of Government Efficiency, and Senator Rand Paul, “for bringing the issue of animal abuse to our attention, leading to the Navy’s decision to ban medical research testing on cats and dogs.”
But holdovers from the Obama and Biden Administrations appear to be preventing this kind of progress at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
A Barack Obama-era NIH staffer, Dr. Nicole Kleinstreuer, has been appointed by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya to be the NIH’s Acting Deputy Director for Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives. Earlier this month, Kleinstreuer told NPR that the NIH has “no intention of just phasing out animal studies overnight.”
The NIH has renewed several controversial animal testing projects initiated by Dr. Anthony Fauci and other NIH staff members.
Gateway Pundit has learned that the NIH has re-upped grant funds for THC experiments on young monkeys at Harvard University’s McLean Hospital that WCW exposed through a Freedom of Information Act request and that Gateway covered in April. The NIH has committed five more years of taxpayer funding to the project, which was initially scheduled to end on April 30, 2025, and has now received nearly $4.5 million.
Hellbound and Down 