Timeline: Beaglegate
Bhattacharya puts an end to NIH beagle labs. Here's a timeline of the last decade of controversy over their operation
There’s been a lot of celebration over NIH Director Bhattacharya’s announcement that the agency’s last in-house beagle lab is gone. Actually, announcement isn’t quite right. It was more like a matter-of-fact statement. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was just repeating what had already been announced.
“We got rid of all the beagle experiments on the NIH campus,” he said in the middle of a May 4 interview on Fox & Friends Weekend as he talked about changing the culture at the agency. That was it.
But those 12 words were huge for groups such as White Coat Waste, PETA, and the Physicians Committee for Ethical Medicine.
In the last decade, White Coat Waste (WCW) has led an aggressive campaign to end the use of dogs for medical research. It focused a lot of its energy on pressuring Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for nearly 40 years, to end the practice. The NIAID is a division of the NIH.
“Today’s landmark victory is especially sweet as our fight to expose and close Fauci and NIH’s in-house dog labs–which slaughtered more than 2,000 beagles over the last 40 years–was the first campaign White Coat Waste started in 2016,” said Anthony Bellotti, the founder and president of WCW, the day Bhattacharya said the last lab was gone.
But to hear WCW spokesman Justin Goodman talk, the victory is more like winning a battle in a war.
“It was the NIH's last in-house dog lab. And it was actually the last deadly dog laboratory across all government agencies inside the agencies themselves,” Goodman says. “Unfortunately, the NIH, the Department of Defense, the FDA and other agencies are still funding experimentation on dogs and cats outside of their agencies at colleges and universities and private companies across the country. So we're hoping to export this great homegrown victory inside the government, outside to these other laboratories that are being funded with our tax dollars.”
The dogs were primarily used to research septic shock, Goodman says. But why beagles?
“Beagles are the victim of choice for the same reason that they make such great pets. They are well-behaved and sweet and forgiving, and that makes them easy to cage and abuse as well,” he says.
He referenced this section of a 2023 proposal for an NIH-funded study in China. The company, Pharmaron, states why it prefers beagles.
Gross. Here’s the entire contract and proposal for that study, followed by the timeline:
November 5, 2016
The White Coat Waste Project publishes a report titled “Spending to Death: Wasteful Government Spending, Transparency Failures, and the Secretive World of Federal Dog Experiments.” The WCW’s report describes how, in 2015 alone, over 1,183 beagles, hounds, and mixed-breed dogs, including puppies, were “subjected to painful, bizarre and wasteful experiments inside federal agency laboratories” operated by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.
According to the Project, the agencies in question purchased the dogs “just to cut them apart, infect them, make them sick, and kill them in taxpayer-funded experiments.” Many of the dogs were used in experiments in which they were intentionally given heart attacks, implanted with experimental technology, or had their skulls drilled.
October 21, 2021
A bipartisan group of 24 lawmakers sign a letter to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci that says they have “grave concerns” that NIAD spent $1.68 million from October 2018 to February 2019 on experiments involving beagle puppies. The money was spent over a four-month period, from October 2018 to February 2019.
Of particular concern is the fact that the invoice to NIAID included a line item for “cordectomy.” As you are likely aware, a cordectomy, also known as “devocalization,” involves slitting a dog’s vocal cords in order to prevent them from barking, howling, or crying. This cruel procedure — which is opposed with rare exceptions by the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Animal Hospital Association, and others — seems to have been performed so that experimenters would not have to listen to the pained cries of the beagle puppies. This is a reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.
The letter asks Fauci to provide a detailed rationale for the tests, which were carried out on 44 beagle puppies who were between six and eight months old.
Six Republican U.S. senators sign a similar letter to Fauci on Oct. 29.
Oct. 28, 2021
Fact-checkers get to work. First, Politifact reports that a photo WCW posted of beagles’ heads in mesh cages didn’t come from a NIAID-funded study and that the journal that published the study erroneously gave NIAID credit. The journal said it made a mistake and issues a correction.
WCW cited a database of NIH-funded research “which appeared to link the agency to the study,” Politifact reports. It even marks up the photo:
Nov. 19, 2021
A story in The Washington Post calls it a “viral and false claim” that NIAID funded the study with beagles’ heads in mesh cages. The Post reports:
The false claim about the funding for the beagle study, research that was conducted in Tunisia, originated with 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 story says the study “does not appear in a database of NIH-funded projects.”
The NIAID did, however, fund another study in Tunisia by the same researchers, the Post reports. It evaluated a vaccine for a parasitic disease that infects humans and dogs.
Twelve dogs were given the vaccine and then put in a fenced-in open space outside during high sand fly season, NIAID said, to see if the dogs still became infected.
WCW’s Justin Goodman doesn’t believe NIAID’s denial and tells the Post it’s “too convenient.”
Dec. 26, 2021
The Washington Post reports that in July 2021, the USDA cited a beagle-breeding facility called Envigo in Cumberland, Va. The NIH is among its clients. The Post story cites a PETA report that found Envigo and its predecessor had contracts with NIH that were “potentially worth” $1.2 million. Among the problems inspectors found, according to the Post:
More than 500 dogs in a building without air conditioning. The dogs were in temperatures above 85 degrees for at least five hours.
Roughly a dozen nursing dogs went without water for 42 hours.
Fight wounds on nearly 50 dogs.
A spokesman for Envigo told the Post it would correct the problems. The company also says its dogs play an “integral role in the development of advanced pacemakers,” vaccine development, and Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis research.
May 19, 2022
The Justice Department files a complaint against Envigo for violations of the Animal Welfare Act. The complaint (see below) says the facility had housed up to 5,000 beagles in the last year in which it received more than “60 citations for non-compliance with the AWA, which have affected thousands of beagles. More than half of those citations were deemed “critical” or “direct,” the most serious types of AWA citation.
Nearly 150 dogs are immediately removed from the facility. In July, Envigo agrees to surrender more than 4,000 beagles and close the facility. The dogs are put up for adoption.
Through the Freedom of Information Act, WCW obtained records of NIH doing business with that facility and others run by Envigo.
June 3, 2024
Fauci appears before a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. While condemning Fauci, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia holds up the photograph of the two beagles being exposed to sand flies as their heads are held in mesh cages.
In the video above, Greene says:
As director of the NIH, you did sign off on these so-called scientific experiments, and as a dog lover, I want to tell you this is disgusting and evil, what you signed off on. And these experiments that happened to beagles are paid for by the American taxpayer. And I want you to know Americans don’t pay their taxes for animals to be tortured like this. So, the type of science that you are representing, Mr. Fauci, is abhorrent, and it needs to stop.
Greene shows the photograph again during another exchange about 30 seconds later, to which Fauci replies:
What do dogs have to do with anything we’re talking about today?
On the same day, Envigo pleads guilty and agrees to pay $35 million in fines.
June 7, 2024
Fresh off of Greene confronting Fauci, the Washington Post takes a deeper dive into that picture it had earlier called a “viral and false claim.”
The Post no longer stridently labels it a “false claim.”
It reports that the NIH couldn’t provide proof that it didn’t fund the study involving dogs’ heads in mesh cases — it only had the word of a researcher at Ohio State who asked for a correction in 2021 after being contacted by the NIH. The editor of the journal agreed but expressed hesitation because she was also an employee of NIAID. She emailed NIAID officials that she was worried about a conflict of interest. The NIH declined the Post’s request to answer questions about the potential conflict.
The story notes that its November 2021 article (mentioned above) said the trapped-beagles claim “does not appear in a database of NIH-funded projects.” That was true — but:
The emails show that, while it was removed before the publication of The Post article, the study had been listed in the database for months and was still listed as of the previous month, when Fauci first asked about the controversy.
It turns out there’s more to the story about the beagle study that NIAID acknowledged funding — the one in which the dogs were reportedly “put in a fenced-in open space outside.”
Finally, other documents obtained by White Coat Waste suggest the Tunisia study funded by NIH was not as benign as the agency suggested. Instead of an “enclosed open space,” the study’s grant application shows a photograph that indicated that the dogs were kept in a cage as they were “exposed to sand fly bites each night through the sand fly season to ensure transmission.” The grant application also described how, separately, dogs would be sedated and placed in cages for two hours while they were exposed to 15 to 30 female sand flies.
The story concludes:
The emails show that NIH was not fully transparent as it tried to handle a public-relations nightmare. Perhaps there was little reason to doubt Satoskar, but officials embraced his explanation without confirming as they rushed out a statement. They made no acknowledgment that they had removed the study from the NIH grant database or that the editor of the journal that quickly issued the correction had a potential conflict of interest. Moreover, the NIH study in Tunisia that the agency said it funded was cast in a positive light that is undermined by the grant application that has since been made public.
Meanwhile, WCW had already posted a contract and research description that it says is for the study that had the viral picture of the two dogs.
WCW also obtained emails from one of the Washington Post reporters, Beth Reinhard, who wrote the 2021 story that said it was a “viral and false claim” that NIAID funded the study. In seeking comment, Reinhard wrote she was working on a story about a “massive disinformation campaign” against Fauci.
May 4, 2025
During an appearance on Fox & Friends Weekend, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya says “we got rid of all the beagle experiments on the NIH campus.” He mentions it as an example of changing the culture at NIH, not as a big policy announcement.
White Coast Waste founder Anthony Bellotti takes credit for the decision, saying:
As the watchdog that first uncovered and battled Dr. Fauci’s beagle tests (the biggest animal testing scandal in history), we’re proud that White Coat Waste has closed the NIH’s last in-house beagle laboratory—and the US government’s biggest dog lab.
Is there anyone more deserving of a public hanging than the treasonous Doctor Fauci- the Mephistophelian Mengele of our time?
I haven't read the timeline yet, but consider this: What would the NY Times, WaPo, CNN, etc, look like right now if they could point a finger at Trump for doing lab experiments on beagles?