NIH Scrambled After ZeroHedge Report On Fauci Beagle Experiments, Scrubbed Database, Then Fed WaPo Disinformation

Last week, Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene took a detour from grilling Anthony Fauci over COVID-19, to confront him with photos of beagles who had been subjected to animal testing experiments widely reported to be funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the National Institutes of Health (NIH), following a 2021 investigation series by the group White Coat Waste Project.

"We should be recommending you to be prosecuted," Greene told Fauci. "We should be writing a criminal referral because you should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. You belong in prison," she continued, adding "That man does not deserve to have a license. As a matter of fact, it should be revoked and he belongs in prison."

This opened up a can of worms which includes a response from White Coat Waste, and triggered the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler to do a deep dive into 'Beaglegage' in an effort to debunk Greene.

When we first saw Greene hold up the photo, we figured this would be easy to debunk — another in a string of misleading attacks against Fauci, who became the public face of the government’s response to the pandemic. -Washington Post

Only to discover that the NIH appears to have lied about funding the experiment, which involved beagles between 6 and 8 months old obtained from the kennels of the Pasteur Institute of Tunis. In the study, the beagles were sedated and then exposed to hundreds of sand flies that had been deprived of food for 24 hours. This exposure took place as part of research into zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis (ZVL), a disease carried by sand flies that can affect dogs and humans.

After ZeroHedge amplified the White Coat Waste report (archived), there was a full blown panic.

In late October 2021, CNN asked Fauci to appear for an interview, and one of his staff members suggested late on Oct. 24 that Fauci pause any TV interviews “until we get a handle on this.” Early the next morning, Fauci emailed 12 officials and asked them to “tell me what grant or contract they are referring to.” Within two hours, one replied that they might have identified the grant. (Most staff members’ names are redacted.)

“Let us find out for sure if it is that grant, and then let us take a look at what the experimental design is, and importantly whether it has received the appropriate ethical and animal care consideration,” Fauci replied in an email. “I want this done right away since we are getting bombarded by protests.”

Within two hours, one of the researchers involved, Abhay Satoskar, a professor of pathology and microbiology at Ohio State University, emailed to say that NIAID had been mistakenly cited as a funder of the study and that he would seek a correction from the journal. One NIAID official wrote in an email that Satoskar “stated that it was mistakenly cited because he was not clear of the true purpose of US funding acknowledgment” and that the program in question had been funded only by the Pasteur Institute.

Satoskar, meanwhile asked Shaden Kamhawi, the editor of the journal, to correct the article. Kamhawi initially agreed, but noted internally that she may have a conflict of interest as a NIAID employee. She then sent an email in a panic over the ZeroHedge article potentially inviting "a lot of noise & unwanted attention for [Fauci]. They also called us an "illegitimate blog of no credibility," which is high praise considering the source.

Study disappears from the database

When the story broke in 2021, the NIH scrubbed it from its database and then fed WaPo disinformation:

When The Post reported on the controversy in November 2021, the article noted: “The trapped-beagles study does not appear in a database of NIH-funded projects.” 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.

“We need that to be corrected too, ASAP please,” one NIH staffer wrote on Oct. 27. The anxiety level rose as officials realized it would take several days, until Nov. 1, before the project would be removed from the database — where reporters could not then find it. -WaPo

What's more, The NIH also issued a statement in 2021 insisting that they funded a separate study in Tunisia involving a vaccine and that the controversial experiment involving sand flies was not funded by them.

Except - internal NIH communications reveal they had no independent proof other than the principal investigator's statement that NIH did not fund the controversial study.

Meanwhile, other documents obtained by White Coat Waste reveal that their cover story about the more benign beagle experiment was bullshit too!

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. -WaPo

Here's WaPo's bottom line:

"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."

Sounds like a National Health Institute of no credibility to us... but then again, what's new.