The National Institutes of Health has quietly booted a Chinese lab that performed grisly experiments on beagles from its list of facilities approved for animal experiments using U.S. taxpayer money.
Sun Yat Sen University is one of six Chinese labs to have been removed from the list since December amid a Trump administration and NIH housecleaning.
The latest to go is China Medical University, axed from the list sometime in the past week.
CMU had become a target of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which in February prodded NIH to cancel a $135,000 grant that included infecting rabbits with malaria.
Chinese labs have been under scrutiny since the coronavirus outbreak, which many U.S. agencies say leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab that received U.S. taxpayer money for some of its animal research.
The White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog group, has been tracking NIH’s efforts and hailed the attempt to clean up its list of labs.
“After [Dr. Anthony] Fauci’s gain-of-function disaster in Wuhan that we first exposed and President Trump quickly defunded in April 2020, no animal labs in China should receive another red cent of taxpayers’ money,” said Anthony Bellotti, White Coat’s president.
White Coat, which opposes taxpayer money for animal testing, said the Chinese labs “abuse dogs, bunnies, primates and other animals in cruel, dangerous and wasteful experiments.”
NIH’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare maintains a list of labs, domestic and foreign, that are approved for animal testing using American taxpayer money. These labs have obtained certification from the Public Health Service that they comply with specific standards for the care of the animals they use and their treatment at the end of the experiments.
The domestic list dropped from 1,108 approved labs in mid-December to 1,097.
The number of foreign labs fell from 348 to 336, meaning the six Chinese labs accounted for half the total decline.
Twenty-one Chinese labs remain on the list. NIH has not said why it booted the labs or why others remain.
The agency did not provide a comment to The Washington Times for this report.
Rep. Lisa McClain, Michigan Republican, has written legislation that would bar U.S. money from going to labs in countries that are adversaries of the U.S., including Russia, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and China.
Only China still has active labs approved.
“My bipartisan AFAR Act would ensure that failures like those of the Wuhan Lab will never happen again,” the congresswoman told The Washington Times. “I’m looking forward to introducing it this Congress. American tax dollars should never fund dangerous, cruel experiments on animals in research labs in China and other adversarial countries.”
Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who sponsors a Senate version of the bill, cheered the Trump administration for acting.
“I have been calling to end these batty studies for years and am thrilled to see the Trump administration cutting off the funding for risky research that never should have been funded in the first place,” Ms. Ernst said. “It makes zero sense for America to borrow billions from China and then turn around and send the money right back.”
The Washington Times reported last year that Sun Yat Sen University carried out gruesome experiments on beagles.
A video compiled by the White Coat Waste Project showed dogs whose spines had been severed crawling on their front paws, and their rears were dragging on the ground. Puppies as young as a day old were “sacrificed” to obtain bone marrow, White Coat Waste Project said.
The experiments were intended to study the effects of severe spinal cord injuries. While the U.S. government funds the labs, WCW said there was no evidence that taxpayer money went specifically to those beagle experiments.
Pharmaron TSP, which is still on the approved list, does spend American money on dog experiments, according to White Coat Waste Project investigations.
One of the labs dropped from the list in recent months is the Shenzen Institutes of Advanced Technology, which is run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The U.S. government has linked the academy to the Chinese military.
Motac Beijing Services, Nanjing Medical University and Medicilon Preclinical Research, which used American money to perform drug-safety tests on rats, also have been removed from the list since December.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.