From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By EMILY KOPP

The National Institutes of Health has closed the last remaining intramural beagle lab conducting painful experiments — the federal government’s largest dog lab — NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said in a television interview Sunday.

A project at the NIH Clinical Center on “stress-induced and sepsis-induced cardiomyopathy” represented the final in-house experiments that induced pain and distress in beagles, classified under U.S. Department of Agriculture pain categories D and E. The project has now been terminated.

“We got rid of all of the beagle experiments on NIH campus,” Bhattacharya said on Fox & Friends Weekend.

“It’s very easy, for instance, to cure Alzheimer’s in mice. But those things don’t translate to humans,” Bhattacharya said. “So we put forward a policy to replace animals in research with technological advances, AI and other tools, that actually translate better to human health.”

(RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Email Exposes How Boss Of NIH-Funded Alzheimer’s ‘Amyloid Mafia’ Shakes Down Critics)

NIH confirmed the news in a post on X.

Watch @NIHDirector_Jay on @FoxNews with @RCamposDuffy where he discusses a new NIH initiative to expand innovative, human-based science while reducing animal use in research, including getting rid of all the beagle experiments on the NIH campus. pic.twitter.com/qfL5oepOBX

— NIH (@NIH) May 4, 2025

The NIH has killed 2,133 beagles in septic shock experiments since 1986, according to a nine-year investigation and advocacy campaign by White Coat Waste Project. Necroposy reports from 41 beagles and other veterinary records obtained by the group through the Freedom of Information Act show that the experiments involved infecting the beagles’ lungs with pneumonia-causing bacteria to induce sepsis and sometimes bleeding them out to induce hemorrhagic shock. The dogs are then euthanized.

Beagles have been used in medical experiments because of their docile temperament. The issue garnered the attention of many on social media and in Congress in 2021 when White Coat Waste revealed evidence that NIH exported $375,800 to a Tunisian lab for experiments that induced sand flies to feed on beagles locked in cages in order to study leishmaniasis. White House Chief Medical Advisor and longtime NIH official Anthony Fauci was flooded with phone calls.

“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,” said White Coat Waste Project Founder Anthony Bellotti in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We applaud the President for cutting this wasteful NIH spending and will keep fighting until we defund all dog labs at home and abroad.”

NIH sourced beagles from contractor Envigo. Envigo reached a plea agreement in June 2024 to pay a $11 million fine for violating the Animal Welfare Act as part of a larger $35.5 million settlement, the largest-ever fine in an Animal Welfare Act case, according to the US Attorney’s Office. Inspections of a Virginia breeding facility revealed the dogs were stuffed in overcrowded kennels filled with feces and fed non-potable drinking water and rotten food.

The NIH announced on April 29 an initiative to shift away from animal experimentation toward less cruel methods more directly relevant to human health such as organoids, organs-on-a-chip, computing modeling and real-world data.

NIH made several commitments as a part of that effort, including establishing the Office of Research Innovation, Validation, and Application within Bhattacharya’s office to help scale non-animal approaches; publishing annual data on the reduction in funding for animal studies; offering more training in non-animal approaches and integrating that expertise into the study sections that make determinations about NIH extramural grants.

As recently as April 15, a longtime NIH official had defended the beagle experiments, saying that “current canine models of sepsis offer several advantages in research, including similar cardiovascular anatomy and the ability to induce sepsis through mechanisms that mimic what occurs in humans,” according to an email from NIH to congressional aides shared with the DCNF.

From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

Placebo trials are critical for determining a new drug’s safety and identifying side effects, but vaccines have been exempt from the requirement for such safety testing until now.

All new vaccines will be required to undergo placebo-controlled safety trials by the order of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in a break with longstanding establishment policy and triggering protests from mainstream media outlets.

HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said that, according to the new policy, such safety trials for all “new vaccines” will be required for licensure, a “radical departure from past practices.”

Placebo trials allow researchers to identify adverse side effects from a drug, clarifying that symptoms are not due to other factors such as the disease the drug seeks to protect against. For this reason, placebo trials are “critical for determining the safety profile of the new drug,” as BioPharma Services has noted.

“Except for the COVID vaccine, none of the vaccines on the CDC’s childhood recommended schedule was tested against an inert placebo, meaning we know very little about the actual risk profiles of these products,” HHS said in a statement.

“HHS is now building surveillance systems that will accurately measure vaccine risks as well as benefits — because real science demands both transparency and accountability,” an HHS spokesperson told The Washington Post.

For years, Kennedy has criticized the fact that vaccines have been exempted from a placebo trial requirement in place for other medicines.

“A lot of the injuries that come from medication are autoimmune injuries and allergic injuries and neurodevelopmental injuries that have long diagnostic horizons or long incubation periods, so you can do the study and you will not see the injury for five years,” Kennedy said in a 2021 interview.

Last year, during a NewsNation Town Hall he highlighted the fact that not one of the 72 vaccine doses now mandated for U.S. children “has ever been subject to a pre-licensing, placebo-controlled trial.”

At the time, the host insisted that this was “not true.” Now that the mainstream media and medical establishment cannot dispute that this has been the case, outlets such as NPR and the BBC are criticizing placebo safety testing trials by claiming that this will allegedly limit access to vaccines and undermine confidence in them – as if access to vaccines takes precedence over whether they have been shown to be safe.

The Washington Post quoted Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, who accused the HHS of “Claiming vaccines have risks the data doesn’t show” and of “trying to overstate vaccine risks,” seemingly unaware of the absurdity of her criticism. If there is a lack of data for vaccine risks, it could be because there haven’t been placebo trials to produce such data.

Kennedy recently told Daily Wire host Michael Knowles that “everything is going to change” regarding the development of vaccines, for which much of the public has concern.

He pledged to “fix” the Centers for Disease Control’s current flawed VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) online mechanism, which Kennedy noted vastly underreports vaccine adverse events.

Pointing out that vaccines are “the only product that’s exempt” from pre-licensing safety testing, Kennedy noted that the protocol has instead been to document injuries “afterward.”

However, “they have a system that doesn’t capture them. In fact, CDC’s own study of its own system said it captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries,” Kennedy said. “It’s worthless, and everybody agrees it’s worthless.”

“Why have we gone for 39 years and nobody’s fixed it?” he wondered, promising, “We’re gonna fix it.”