How the Corporate Media Launched a Disinformation Campaign to Protect Fauci

By Leighton Woodhouse

By now you’ve surely heard about Anthony Fauci and his laboratory beagles, but in case you haven’t, it goes like this: For forty years, Fauci, as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has funded gruesome experiments on animals. Beagles in particular are one of the favored species for these experiments, because of their docile and people-pleasing nature, which makes for less hassle for the humans who subject them to pain and suffering. In one of these NIAID-funded experiments, in Tunisia, sedated beagles’ heads were put into mesh bags with swarms of starved sand flies, who fed on the live dogs.

 

The other thing you may have heard is that the story is just another right-wing conspiracy theory. You may have heard this from The Washington Post, from any of a number of self-proclaimed “fact checkers,” or maybe even from the globally renowned Beacon of Honesty David Frum of The Atlantic.

 

I’ve been reporting on this story for the past few weeks. In fact, I’ve been reporting it as closely as anyone, if not more so. It’s been an extremely educational experience for me, but not because I was unfamiliar with the industry of animal experimentation, or NIAID’s leading role within it. What’s been educational is seeing up close and first-hand how the mainstream media constructs and deploys a brazen misinformation campaign.

 

First of all, just to get this detail out of the way: the story is true. As head of NIAID, the second biggest institute within the National Institutes of Health, Anthony Fauci has spent billions of dollars over four decades funding scientific experiments on animals, many of them stomach-turning. NIAID does not deny this. In fact, the published scientific papers that describe these heinous experiments routinely credit NIAID and NIH as their funders, and sometimes as direct collaborators. You can look them up yourself: here are just a few of them.

 

 

Of the numerous horrific experiments on dogs funded by agencies and budgets controlled by Fauci, there’s only one that is in dispute: the one in Tunisia. That is the experiment which involved placing sedated beagles’ heads in mesh bags with swarms of starved sand flies, which feasted on the live dogs in order to transmit to them a parasite that carries a disease called “leishmaniasis.” The scientific paper that described the results of that experiment, published on July 15, originally credited NIAID as a funder.

 

 

But after this ethical monstrosity was publicized and denounced by an anti-animal testing group specializing in a building left/right coalitions — the White Coat Waste Project, which, as Glenn Greenwald reported in this space two weeks ago, became the target of a Washington Post hit piece as punishment for denouncing Fauci — this particular experiment created a minor media sensation and a major headache for NIH. In the wake of that recent controversy, the paper’s authors — just three weeks ago, on November 11 — suddenly retracted their statement about NIAID funding. In wooden language that reads like a hostage note, they now claim that when they said that NIAID had paid for this experiment, it was by accident.

 

 

There are plenty of reasons to doubt that denial, which I’ll go into shortly. But ultimately: who cares? This was just one revolting NIAID-funded experiment among many that White Coat Waste exposed, and not even the worst of them. NIAID does not deny funding any of those other experiments, which are just a few out of thousands of animal experiments which NIAID has underwritten going back to the 1980s. It has long been known that experiments on dogs rarely if ever yield any tangible benefits for medical research regarding humans, making these experiments not only morally reprehensible but useless. Even if we were to concede NIAID’s denial that they funded this one specific test — and there is no reason to grant them that (again, I’ll get into this shortly) — it would put only the slightest dent in the overall story, which is that Anthony Fauci is personally accountable for billions of dollars worth of wasteful and cruel experiments on innocent, terrified animals.

 

Fauci’s highly cynical strategy — and therefore the strategy of his media allies — is to focus everyone’s attention on this one sole project in Tunisia, then deny that he funded it. The obvious goal is to obscure and bury what they cannot deny even if that denial were true: namely, that agencies and budgets controlled by Fauci fund thousands of similar or worse experiments on dogs. Not only does NIAID not deny this core fact, but, as demonstrated above, they admit this in multiple reports and experimentation reports.

 
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But now we get to the part of this episode that was particularly educational to me. That single denial — a highly dubious one — generated an orgy of mainstream media reporters tripping over each other to dismiss the entire story of Fauci animal abuse as “misinformation.”

 

Before NIAID issued this denial, there was almost no coverage at all of the story in the mainstream media. With a few isolated exceptions, it was covered only in conservative media, independent media, and social media for obvious reasons: since it reflects poorly on Fauci, the liberal sector of the corporate media has no interest in doing anything other than burying it. But as soon as NIAID chummed the water with its questionable denial, suddenly it was a hot topic in the press: not as a story about animal abuse, but about “right-wing misinformation.” In other words, corporate journalists had no interest in any of this — including the misuse of taxpayer funds to support ethically monstrous and medically useless experiments — until they found a way to wield it as a cudgel to attack right-wing media and shield Fauci.

 
Such cynical partisan scheming is appropriate or at least expected from DNC operatives, but not actual journalists. But that, of course, is the point: these corporate journalists resemble and see themselves far more as the latter than the former. And their conduct here proves that.
 

The first journalist to ride to Fauci’s rescue was The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. In his October 25 column, Milbank cited NIAID’s denial and, from that alone, concluded that the entire story was a product of “the right-wing disinformation machine and its crusade against Fauci.” (When I challenged Milbank on these claims on Twitter, he blocked me.) Then, following Milbank’s lead, suddenly a slew of “fact checker” websites that had never weighed in on the subject before put up posts casting doubt on the story.

 

At the same time, in The Washington Post’s newsroom, two reporters started digging into White Coat Waste, as Greenwald reported. As he demonstrated, The Post had covered the group before, always favorably, when its target was the Trump administration. But now its target was Anthony Fauci, so everything changed.

 

Suddenly, the group that The Post had heralded numerous times in the past as an innovative and successful bipartisan campaign was degraded into a “little known animal rights group” whose work was being “amplified by a right-wing echo chamber eager to thrash Fauci.” The article described all of the mean phone calls NIAID was getting due to the media reports of its history of funding animal cruelty, and insinuated shadowy connections between White Coat Waste and the Republican Party that it could not prove beyond guilt-by-association and that it would never have even bothered noting for a Democratic Party-aligned group. As for the Tunisia experiment, the Post reporters repeatedly decreed it a “false claim,” and lambasted White Coat Waste for continuing to accuse NIAID of funding the research even after NIAID claimed that it had not — as if the government’s threadbare denial alone should be the end of the story for everyone, as it apparently is for the Fauci-adoring Washington Post.

    
 

On the same day The Post‘s story ran, it also published a summary of an interview with NIH director Francis Collins. Responding to what the paper described repeatedly as the “misinformation” about NIAID’s funding of the Tunisia experiment, Collins told the paper that the government should “identify” those spreading the unflattering news and “bring them to justice.” The article didn’t elaborate, but on its face, Collins seems to be suggesting that the Biden administration prosecute critics of Collins and Fauci (people like me and White Coat and Greenwald and others).

 

Now, about the Tunisia claim itself:

 

NIAID, as noted, only denied having funded the experiment after it had generated negative media attention. Given that the experiment and the funding claim about NIAID had been published in a well-regarded journal, why did Fauci’s agency deny this only once the experiment began to generate negative political reaction? NIAID’s motivation for wanting to distance itself and Fauci from this repellent research is obvious.

 

But was its denial legitimate? We do not yet have the evidence to say dispositively one way or the other. But the circumstances surrounding this denial are quite elucidating.

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