Exclusive | Defense Department, NIH collaborating on cruel dog experiments with problematic Chinese labs, GOP lawmakers and watchdog say

The Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health (NIH) are still collaborating on research with a Beijing lab for “cruel” drug experiments on beagles, according to a federal watchdog and Republican lawmakers who have sought sanctions on the biotech entity involved, citing concerning links to the Chinese Communist Party.Pharmaron, a Chinese biotech firm, is currently testing pharmaceuticals on up to 300 beagles per week to learn how to better treat neurological disorders, with the help of US taxpayer funding from the DOD and NIH, according to federal contracts exclusively shared with The Post by the White Coat Waste Project.The NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences received initial funding “specifically” from the Pentagon, the contract shows, to funnel $124,200 in total for the drug experiments on beagle puppies — as well as mice and rats — at the Beijing-based company’s lab between Sept.1, 2023, and May 31, 2025.“Beagle dog is docile, cute and easy to domesticate,” states Pharmaron’s proposal on Aug.

17, 2023, noting that all research would comport with the Animal Welfare Act and the Public Health Service Policy on Laboratory Animal Care.The document goes on to describe how the hundreds of pups, some as young as eight months, “will be reused” throughout the study “to save animals and decrease cost,” while laying out criteria for weak, infected or those suffering organ dysfunction to be “euthanized.”The nonprofit government watchdog group filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain the contract as part of an investigation last year into more than two dozen Chinese labs that had received more than $2 million for animal testing and other experiments.“No animal lab in China should get another red cent of taxpayers’ money,” said Justin Goodman, senior vice president at government watchdog White Coat Waste Project, in a statement.“They ghoulishly chose to abuse beagles because they�...