Going to the Dogs Over Anthony Fauci

Photo by NIAID, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

This weekend saw a new controversy being touted by anti-Fauci brigade.

The White Coat Waste Project, the nonprofit organization that first pointed out that U.S. taxpayers were being used to fund the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology, have now turned its sights on Anthony Fauci on another animal-testing-related matter — infecting dozens of beagles with disease-causing parasites to test an experimental drug on them.

House members, most of whom are Republicans, want Fauci to explain himself in response to allegations brought on by the White Coat Waste Project that involve drugging puppies.

According to the White Coat Waste Project, the Food and Drug Administration does not require drugs to be tested on dogs, so the group is asking why the need for such testing.

White Coat Waste claims that 44 beagle puppies were used in a Tunisia, North Africa, laboratory, and some of the dogs had their vocal cords removed, allegedly so scientists could work without incessant barking.

This has led to the usual outrage, memes and demands that Fauci be fired and arrested. So is there anything to this story?

Eh, sort of.

Most of the information being reported appears to be accurate. White Coat Waste uploaded the actual documents complete with references to the page numbers from which their information is drawn. While I can find no references supporting the headline that dogs were confined in cages to be “eaten alive” by parasites, there is a line item for cordectomies and directions that the dogs would be euthanized after the experiment was completed.

However…there is zero evidence that Fauci was involved in this research and none yet that he personally approved it. Having been on both sides of the grant process, it would be unusual for someone at his level to be directly involved in evaluating and approving research grants. To be fair, my experience is with NASA and NSF so maybe Fauci’s agency is different, but I doubt it. High-level approval generally applies to massive multi-billion-dollar programs, not small programs like this. To give you a sense of scale, Fauci’s NIAID awards about 4,000 grants every year.

There are many laws and regulations governing ethical research on living beings. But funding agencies don’t have the resources to monitor compliance; this duty is taken on by an Institutional Review Board (IRB, for human research subjects) or Institutional Animal Care and and Use Committee (IACUC, for animals). No grant will be funded without the approval of such agencies and failure of those agencies to enforce the rules can result in the loss of research funding (as well as potential civil or criminal liability).

This kind of animal experimentation is not unusual and experimentation on dogs specifically is not unusual. Every year, about 800,000 animals are experimented upon in the United States alone, including 60,000 or more dogs. Experiments on dogs, in fact, have a very long history. One of the most famous involved Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski, who removed the pancreases of dogs to confirm that failure of the pancreas was responsible for diabetes.

The utility of research on dogs can be debated. While some scientists claim that computer models and human experiments can suffice, others are dubious about this and think animal experimentation is critical. Supporters of canine research would point out that, if the dogs weren’t being experimented upon, they’d just join the 400,000 dogs that are euthanized by shelters every year; opponents would argue that making them suffer on the way to euthanization just makes a bad situation worse. And they would also argue that the methods being used seem unusually cruel and unnecessary.

I’m not going to get into that debate. But I will point out that if suffering and euthanizing dogs is what worries you, this seems an odd place to start. It seems an especially odd place to start for a Right Wing that has spent decades ridiculing and mocking Animal Rights Activists.¹ Over the last decade, over half a million dogs have been the subject of medical experimentation just within the United States. And the vast majority of those posting picture of puppies and demanding Fauci’s head didn’t say a single word. But now that they can link their nemesis — however vaguely — to a small experiment, they’re all about about animal rights and compassion? I welcome a vigorous debate on this subject but does anyone think their concern will last beyond the next new cycle?

A more relevant controversy that has gotten a bit more traction is whether or not Fauci lied when questioned by Senator Rand Paul on the NIH funding Gain-of-Function research:

The National Institutes of Health is now admitting to funding gain-of-function research on bats infected with coronaviruses at a lab in Wuhan, China despite repeated denials from Dr. Anthony Fauci that U.S. tax dollars were used on the funding.

In a letter to Rep. James Comer, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, an NIH official admits that a “limited experiment” was conducted in order to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”

The letter states that the laboratory mice infected with the modified bat virus “became sicker” than mice that were given the unmodified bat virus.

The official, Lawrence A. Tabak, accused the New York City-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, who funneled funds to the Wuhan lab, of not being transparent about the work that was taking place.

Gain-of-function research involves extracting viruses from animals to artificially engineer in a laboratory to make them more transmissible and deadly to humans.

Paul and the Fauci Fanatics are naturally doing a victory lap over this. Some are even going so far as to claim this “proves” that the COVID-19 pandemic was engineered by Fauci. But the truth is much more hazy, as Dr. Angela Rasmussen explains:

This tweet is wrong as the letter below clearly states that this wasn’t GOF by the P3CO definition, which for NIH-funded work is the relevant standard.

But though this is politically motivated, the lack of transparency & failure to comply with NIH requirements is indefensible. https://t.co/i68O2Tq9e9

— Dr. Angela Rasmussen (@angie_rasmussen) October 21, 2021

To sum up her Twitter thread: Fauci is still technically right. Gain-of-function research has a very specific definition. This research was not designed to create strains that would be deadlier or more infectious. It was designed to see what would happen if a spike protein were changed. Stretching my limited knowledge here, this seems to come down to intent, whether or not you are trying to create a more dangerous strain. That having been said, once the results were in, Ecohealth and the Wuhan Institute should not have withheld this information from NIH. This may be a failure to comply with the requirements of the grants as well as unethical. So there is a scandal here; it’s just not what Rand Paul and his retinue of conspiracy-addled satellites are saying it is. Finally, the contention that this has anything to do with the COVID-19 pandemic is entirely spurious. The strain that was being worked on is extremely distant from the strain that exploded into the world almost two years ago.

I am in an odd and lonely place on Anthony Fauci. I am not in Camp Saint Fauci, a group that sees him as infallible and makes hagiographic documentaries about him. But neither am I in Camp Adolph Fauci, which sees him as some sort of demonic creator of our woes. He’s a scientist who has done a reasonable job in unusual circumstances, made some mistakes, enjoyed the spotlight and drawn an unreasonable amount of both praise and criticism. Fauci made a huge unforced error early on by misleading the public on masks. And I feel he has been too quick to cast personal attacks on him as “attacks on science”; he may have become the focal point for anti-science gibberish, but that doesn’t make him a living embodiment of science. But overall…I think he’s been…fine. Not great, not horrible, but fine.

It’s important to remember that Fauci has no actual power; he can only advise and comment. Despite his lack of power, he has, partly through his own words and actions, become the embodiment of the various debates over COVID-19 and the response thereto. He has therefore, like everything else about the pandemic, becomes another front in the Culture War. The more one side praises him, the more the other hates him. And vice versa.

My point here is not to debate Fauci’s success or failure in the pandemic; history will decide that. My point is that people who have been on these issues long before COVID have credibility when they lob criticisms at him or at the government agencies he is involved in. But the clamor among those who have been acting in bad faith from the very beginning crosses me as opportunistic and disingenuous. They don’t care about dog experiments or the origin of COVID-19; they care about Fauci. What they care about is someone who has come to represent everything they hate about the pandemic. It reminds me of one of the my favorite quotes from Eric Hoffer: “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” The COVID “skeptics” need a devil; Fauci is it. And whatever evidence they can muster to “prove” that he’s the devil is going to be mustered.

There’s a case to be made that Fauci should step back from the public stage because he’s become too much of a focal point for inchoate Right Wing rage about the pandemic. But I feel like that rage will just be redirected elsewhere if he retires from public life. Because ultimately, this isn’t even about him; this is about a tiny population of grifters who are determined to turn a global pandemic into yet another front in the Culture War. And if they have to suddenly discover a concern for animal rights or pretend to understand the complex details of grants administration or act like one man is directing the global response to the pandemic…well, that’s what they’re going to do. Because they can’t imagine not being angry about something. And the rage machine always needs more fuel.

1. This criticism doesn’t apply to White Coat Waste, the source of these documents. While they are a partisan outfit, they’ve opposed animal experimentation for years, although their agitation has taken on a decidedly MAGA flavor of late.