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Jay Bhattacharya Closes NIH’s Last Beagle Lab

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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.

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“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.

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.

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Addictions

Four new studies show link between heavy cannabis use, serious health risks

Published on May 4, 2025

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Cannabis products purchased in Ontario and B.C., including gummies, pre-rolled joints, chocolates and dried flower; April 11, 2025. [Photo credit: Alexandra Keeler]

By Alexandra Keeler

New Canadian research shows a connection between heavy cannabis use and dementia, heart attacks, schizophrenia and even death

Six months ago, doctors in Boston began noticing a concerning trend: young patients were showing up in emergency rooms with atypical symptoms and being diagnosed with heart attacks.

“The link between them was that they were heavy cannabis users,” Dr. Ahmed Mahmoud, a cardiovascular researcher and physician in Boston, told Canadian Affairs in an interview.

These frontline observations mirror emerging evidence by Canadian researchers showing heavy cannabis use is associated with significant adverse health impacts, including heart attacks, schizophrenia and dementia.

Sources warn public health measures are not keeping pace with rapid changes to cannabis products as the market is commercialized.

“The irony of this moment is that society’s risk perception of cannabis is at an all-time low, at the exact moment that the substance is probably having increasingly negative health impacts,” said Dr. Daniel Myran, a physician and Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa. Myran was lead researcher on three new Canadian studies on cannabis’ negative health impacts.

Legalization

Canada was the first G7 country to create a commercial cannabis market when it legalized the production and sale of cannabis in 2018.

The drug is now widely used in Canada.

In the 2024 Canadian Cannabis Survey, an annual government survey of cannabis trends, 26 per cent of respondents said they used cannabis for non-medical purposes in the past year, up from 22 per cent in 2018. Among youth, that number was 41 per cent.

Health Canada’s website warns that cannabis use can lower blood pressure and raise heart rates, which can increase the risk of a heart attack. But the warnings on cannabis product labels vary. Some mention risks of anxiety or effects on memory and concentration, but make no mention of cardiovascular risks.

The annual cannabis survey also shows a significant percentage of Canadians remain unaware of cannabis’ health risks.

In the survey, only 70 per cent of respondents said they had enough reliable information to make informed decisions about cannabis use. And 50 per cent of respondents said they had not seen any education campaigns or public health messages about cannabis.

At the same time, researchers are finding mounting evidence that cannabis use is associated with health risks.

A 2023 study by researchers at the University of Calgary, the University of Alberta and Alberta Health Services found that adults with cannabis use disorder faced a 60 per cent higher risk of experiencing adverse cardiovascular events — including heart attacks. Cannabis use disorder is marked by the inability to stop using cannabis despite negative consequences, such as work, social, legal or health issues.

Between February and April of this year, three other Canadian studies linked frequent cannabis use to elevated risks of developing schizophrenia, dementia and mortality. These studies were primarily conducted by researchers at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and ICES uOttawa (formerly the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences).

“These results suggest that individuals who require hospital-based care for a [cannabis use disorder] may be at increased risk of premature death,” said the study linking cannabis-related hospital visits with increased mortality rates.

The three 2024 studies all examined the impacts of severe cannabis use, suggesting more moderate users may face lower risks. The researchers also cautioned that their research shows a correlation between heavy cannabis use and adverse health effects, but does not establish causality.

 

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Budtenders

Health experts say they are troubled by the widespread perception that cannabis is entirely benign.

“It has some benefits, it has some side effects,” said Mahmoud, the Boston cardiovascular researcher. “We need to raise awareness about the side effects as well as the benefits.”

Some also expressed concern that the commercialization of cannabis products in Canada has created a race to produce products with elevated levels of THC, the main psychoactive compound that produces a “high.”

THC levels have more than doubled since legalization, yet even products with high THC levels are marketed as harmless.

“The products that are on the market are evolving in ways that are concerning,” Myran said. “Higher THC products are associated with considerably more risk.”

Myran views cannabis decriminalization as a public health success, because it keeps young people out of the criminal justice system and reduces inequities faced by Indigenous and racialized groups.

“[But] I do not think that you need to create a commercial cannabis market or industry in order to achieve those public health benefits,” he said.

Since decriminalization, the provinces have taken different approaches to regulating cannabis. But even in provinces where governments control cannabis distribution, such as New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, products with high THC levels dominate retail shelves and online storefronts.

In Myran’s view, federal and provincial governments should instead be focused on curbing harmful use patterns, rather than promoting cannabis sales.

Ian Culbert, executive director of the Canadian Public Health Association, thinks governments’ financial interest in the cannabis industry creates a conflict of interest.

“[As with] all regulated substances, governments are addicted to the revenue they create,” he said. “But they also have a responsibility to safeguard the well-being of citizens.”

Culbert believes cannabis retailers should be required to educate customers about health risks — just as bartenders are required to undergo Smart Serve training and lottery corporations are required to mitigate risks of gambling addiction.

“Give ‘budtenders’ the training around potential health risks,” he said.

“While cannabis may not be the cause of some of these negative health events … it is the intersection at which an intervention can take place through the transaction of sales. So is there something we can do there that can change the trajectory of a person’s life?”

This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.

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Health

RFK Jr. orders placebo safety trials for all new vaccines in major policy decision

Published on May 3, 2025

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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.”

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