The White Coat Waste Project

In my eyes, there are three effective arguments to be made against animal experimentation in general, and specifically the biolab research involving dangerous natural (or artificial) pathogens:

•It’s cruel (to the point most people would not support it if they understood what was actually happening).

•It’s often quite dangerous (e.g., the lab leaks).

•It’s quite costly and often a massive waste of money.

This third point is particularly important, as while sadists always exist, I believe the primary reason this cruel reckless research persists (and why state governments staunchly defend it despite local communities continually protesting it) is the substantial federal grants that subsidize the research. For instance, the Colorado University constructing the bat lab (which has received 393 million dollars from the NIH since 2014) received a 6.7 million dollar NIH grant for the lab.

Likewise, I’ve previously covered an immensely unpopular initiative in Hawaii (“controlling” wild mosquito populations by routinely releasing hundreds of millions of lab-modified mosquitos that leave unpleasant bites) that continues to be scaled up despite significant public protest against it (and no evidence of efficacy or ecological safety—all of which is detailed further here). Like the Colorado Lab, the state government has been extremely secretive about what’s actually going on (which has thus required FOIA’s) and Hawaii has aggressively defended the program in court. In my eyes, this is entirely due to the U.S. Department of Interior having committed over 33 million dollars to the program (e.g., 14 million from here, 16 million from here and 3 million from here).
Note: I am now very hopeful DOGE will continue to make headway in shutting down these highly unpopular and harmful grifts.

In turn, while it’s often a lost cause to stop this juggernaut, one of the most effective approaches I have seen to stop all of this is to effectively blend all three points together (as that way, parts of the message appeal to individuals on both sides of the political spectrum). One newcomer, the White Coat Waste Project (WCW) has been very savvy in identifying politically persuasive tactics to shut down animal testing:

As much of the United States entered COVID lockdowns in April 2020, a tiny group that campaigns against federal funding for animal experiments spotted an opportunity. WCW sprung into action, persuading DailyMail to run a story saying the US government had funded the [Wuhan] lab. Then all hell broke loose.

WCW has focused on the fact we waste approximately 20 billion dollars a year conducting cruel and unnecessary (and often dangerous) experiments on animals and many of the horror stories that have swept through the media (and closed some of the crueler Federal labs) originated from the WCW’s work. For example, they just made national headlines at a recent Congressional hearing that highlighted many of the absurd, cruel, and pointless animal experiments the NIH was funding (most of which were approved by Fauci) that included at least 241 million being spent on extremely dubious transgender animal experiments. Since this hearing effectively synopsized many of the major issues in the animal research field and made a compelling case for defunding much of it, I clipped it for this article:

Note: one of the most important points WCW highlighted is that most of this money doesn’t go to the experiments themselves (e.g., 92% in one case), but rather to the sponsoring institutions. As such, a good case can be made that the primary reason this highly questionable research is conducted is because it creates the cover for an untraceable slush fund.

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Lastly, one of the primary reasons such an urgent focus has been directed towards avian influenza has been due to the fear it could “jump to humans and cause a pandemic.” Many (myself included) believe if this happens, it will most likely be due to the gain of function experiments being conducted on avian influenza that will allow it to jump to humans (which as the WCW recently showed, we’ve already spent over a million dollars on in China).