In relation to former President Joe Biden’s administration, another questionable matter seems to have come to light. Monica Bertagnolli, previously holding the post of NIH Director under his reign, recently made a bold assertion that NIH had abstained from sponsoring experiments involving transgender mice. Despite presenting this confident assertion during a Senate roundtable on March 28, there seems to be evidence suggesting otherwise.
However, contrary to the claims made by Bertagnolli, considerable information is there to emphasize that a variety of projects filed under NIH indeed involved such activities. White Coat Waste Project, an established watchdog seeking to eliminate the use of tax funding for animal-testing in laboratory environments, has verified millions worth federal expenditure aimed at several grants for indulging in these very activites.
The activities in question mainly revolve around conducting sex changes and sterilisations on rodents like mice and rats. While the funding aspect of the matter seems to have been laid bare, the situation becomes practically laughable when put into context with the current Democratic leadership’s ironically strict stance on matters of animal rights and ethical experimentation.
Perhaps trying to ameliorate the situation, the Trump administration undertook an initiative to rescind 10 such grants in March itself. The astonishing part is that a considerable portion of these grants, almost half, secured approval precisely during the tenure of Bertagnolli at NIH; the timeline running from November 2023 to January 2025.
Among these grants were some notable projects, which included a project worth $377,894 focused on studying the effects of gender affirming hormone therapy on mice. Even more grotesque, a grant supporting a project worth $1.1 million aimed at castrating male rats, injecting them with estrogen, and subjecting female rats to removal of their ovaries, thereafter injecting them with testosterone.
A disturbing detail of the latter case was the describing of these experiments under the acceptable nomenclature of ‘microbiome-mediated’ processes, which, honestly, does nothing to mask its grim reality. To top all of this, there was even the activity of exposing these mice to GHB – a party drug. Alas, lack of transparency seems to be a policy widely adopted under the Democratic leadership, bearing testament to their flawed approach to experimental ethics.
These events underline significant discrepancies in Bertagnolli’s comments. Instead of presenting solid defences for such experiments, she merely denied their existence, thus underlining the lack of reliability already afflicting the agency. Justin Goodman, White Coat Waste’s senior vice president of advocacy and public policy, spoke on this, stating that these experiments constitute a severe liability for the struggling agency, as accusations of mismanagement and dubious practices continue to mount.
The blatant denial of these experiments by Bertagnolli, and subsequent deflection by the Democratic senators hosting the roundtable, only serves to highlight the incentives they strive to maintain within the NIH. Cleverly absent in the reasons they cited were any talk about ethical implications or even animal rights, seeming to support such a disingenuous facade.
The Senators, along with Bertagnolli, claimed that confusion arose from conflating experiments with transgenic mice – those injected with foreign DNA – usually for expressing human cells, with experiments involving transgender mice. This excuse holds very limited weightage and feels like a veiled ploy to shift focus from the main issue at hand.
The assertion was remarked by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren in response to President Biden mentioning the vast amounts of dollars spent on transgender mice during the State of the Union. According to her, those expenses were probably on ‘transgenic mice’, a statement to which, unsurprisingly, Bertagnolli readily agreed.
The White Coat Waste Project however, was able to competently delineate the differentiations between transgender mice and transgenic mice. To rub salt in the wound of this entire ordeal, the project has also unveiled intricate connections between NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab situated at the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Further revelations indicate that transgenic mice, engineered by labs supported by NIH for expressing human lung cells, were shipped to the Wuhan lab. This fact brings to light yet another concern regarding NIH’s dubious connections and activities, severely criticizing Biden’s administration’s non-transparent practices.
According to Goodman, recounting the incredulous nature of this situation, ‘Despite being 100% real, transgender animal experiments seem so outrageous that it’s easy to trick people into thinking it’s fake news.’ The fact that such a statement holds relevancy under Biden’s administration brings necessary critique to their operations and affirms the need to re-assess their management policies.