Citation From the October 26, 2021, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): A nonprofit organization called the White Coat Waste Project has just found that a lab in Tunisia, North Africa, infected dozens of beagles with disease-causing parasites. This research was funded by Tony Fauci's NIH, which sent a $375,000 grant to the lab. Now, according to the nonprofit, the money went to quote "drugging beagles, locking their heads in mesh cages full of hungry sand flies so the insects could eat them alive." That's disgusting and the people who funded it should be submitted to that to see how they like it. By the way, The Washington Post today defended it. A man, a columnist there called Dana Milbank, who will defend nearly anything, apparently his lot came up and it was his job to take one for the team, so he wrote a straight-face piece saying complaining about this is somehow immoral. He'll defend anything.
Kathy Guillermo is senior vice president at PETA. She joins us tonight. Kathy, thanks so much for coming on. Look, this is so offensive that it is hard even to talk about it on TV but I want to leave open the possibility that maybe there is some reason we had to torture dogs to death? Give us your view.
KATHY GUILLERMO (GUEST): There is no reason for the disgrace that this experiment is and unfortunately, it is just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on at NIH. NIH buys thousands of dogs, they subject them to experiments that only Freddy Krueger could think up, and all of this has to change. You know, the last time I was on here with you, I said that NIH Director Francis Collins needs to go. And fortunately, since then he has announced his resignation. Now the rest of the NIH directors need to go too.
CARLSON: Well that's exactly right. My sense from reading a lot about this is many of these torture sessions — they're not even experiments, they're just torturing animals who love us and can't help themselves -- this is driven by funding. So there's money available, so the experiment takes place, but it doesn't necessarily help science or any people, it's just, they need to spend the money.
GUILLERMO: That's what we know, and they spend about $19 billion of it every year on animal experiments even though we know that these experiments are not going to find cures and treatments for human beings. And if you look at the other laboratories, right inside NIH's laboratory in Maryland, experimenter Elizabeth Murray, as we exposed last year, brain damages monkeys and then tries to frighten them in tiny cages with plastic snakes and spiders. This kind of experimentation goes on all the time. If you look at the primate center at University of Washington, they are full-body irradiating monkeys, destroying their immune system completely, and we are all paying for this. There is no reason to do it. It needs to stop.
CARLSON: I feel sick just hearing these stories. Why would anybody — you see people reflexively defend the stuff. “Ooh it's science.” It's cruelty, it's not science. But why would anyone defend this?
GUILLERMO: Defending the status quo seems to be the default position of most people, unfortunately. But that's not how we progress as a society and we have to get NIH to come to terms with this and remember that their constituency is not the annual experimenters; NIH's constituency is the American public.
CARLSON: Defending the status quo seems to be the default position for a lot of people. Boy, I don't think I could've put it better than that. Thank you for saying that. That's exactly right. Kathy Guillermo, thank you.