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PETA has been shouting it from the rooftops: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) hands over fistfuls of taxpayers’ cash to foreign laboratories without blinking an eye, never bothering to check up on what these places do with it. Now there’s even more proof.
A report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General has found that in fiscal years 2019 and 2020, NIH never received a whopping 74% of the audits it required from foreign laboratories it funded. This means that the laboratories that spent at least $750,000 per fiscal year never bothered to say what they were using the money for.
Were the animals in these laboratories starved? Were they given enough water? Did the experimenters uphold basic animal welfare standards?
Who knows? NIH didn’t check, according to the report.
It gets worse.
Of the 28 reports that NIH did receive, 10 of them required follow-up, but NIH addressed only three of them.
NIH forks over up to $300 million each year to foreign laboratories that sicken, slice open, and kill animals in pointless experiments. This new report provides hard numbers that confirm what PETA has already said: There is no oversight on how that money is spent.
Millions Wasted While Animals Die
The report echoes the findings of a PETA investigation into an NIH-funded “laboratory” in Colombia. The decrepit facility gobbled up more than $17 million in U.S. tax funds while keeping monkeys in filthy, feces-covered outdoor cages, denying animals veterinary care, and allegedly manipulating data.
Our investigation exposed just one example of NIH’s deep-rooted practice of funding exceedingly gruesome and worthless experiments on animals in foreign laboratories. Australian experimenters received more than $2 million to addict dogs to opioids, Canadian experimenters severed rabbits’ vocal cords on the U.S. taxpayer dole, French experimenters addicted mice to alcohol, and the list goes on.
One Solution: The CARGO Act
The Office of Inspecter General instructed NIH to clean up its mess, and we fully support that directive. But given the agency’s history of willful ignorance and invariable indifference, we need to take matters into our own hands. The only way to stop more tax money from being funneled into wasteful and fraudulent foreign laboratories is to turn off the spigot at the source.
The bipartisan Cease Animal Research Grants Overseas (CARGO) Act (HR 4757) is a landmark bill that would do just that by preventing NIH from funding any experiments on animals outside the U.S. Period.
What You Can Do
If you’re a U.S. resident, please TAKE ACTION by urging your U.S. representative to support the CARGO Act:
Pass the CARGO Act
And everyone can urge the Colombian government to ban the capture of monkeys for biomedical experiments:
Stop Monkey Abductions
