Little heads up: This edition of Waste of the Week contains some rather racy visuals of monkeys who were used in a Chinese animal lab’s male birth control experiments, and were filmed during some very private moments. 

You paid for the experiment, and the visuals. And the people who took your money and took this video, broke the law while they were at it.

But that doesn’t mean you want these images in your head. Yeah. We get it.

🙈  Just scroll on down to the bottom of the blog if you prefer to get right to the part where we say how you can help us make this stop. 🙈

And with that, we ask: What in the world do you even say about the sorts of people who make a video like this?

Here’s a clip of the publicly-funded primate porn that violated federal law.

Well, if you’re the National Institutes of Health you say:

HERE, take lots of taxpayer dollars! Grab as many as you want!

Indeed, the NIH handed over about $30 million taxpayer dollars to the folks who made that video.

It was made as part of a $3 million experiment to test a natural herb as an oral male contraceptive compound on mice and monkeys at an animal lab in China. 

Oh, what, you thought the NIH was *just* shipping your money to China for perilous experiments on coronavirus-infected bats? 

For this monkey business, the taxpayer-funded peeping toms gave some male monkeys the herb in their food, some for as long as 2.4 years.

These male monkeys and some who weren’t being fed the compound were paired with female monkeys, just to see what would happen.

Well guess what happened.

This baby was fathered by a monkey who taking the experimental compound, after he was no longer forced to consume it. There is no mention of what became of the monkey babies who were born out of this experiment.

Another thing going on with your cash was these white coats collected semen from the monkeys.

By knocking them out with ketamine, then delivering electric currents of various intensity into their rectums.

Here’s the thing—well, one of the things: The herb in question, called lei gong teng or thunder god vine, was already known to decrease fertility in human men. Doctors in China observed that men who drank thunder god vine in a tea, “displayed compromised fertility.” Those are the words of these white coats themselves!

Which raises the question of why you couldn’t conduct these experiments on willing human volunteers instead of abusing innocent monkeys.

Not just monkeys, either. The white coats experimented on a couple hundred mice, as well—and on the babies (known as pups) who were conceived and born at the Chinese animal lab.

The mice were “sacrificed” during the experiment—that means killed, in mad scientist-speak—and their organs harvested and photographed.

And then you know what else they did? These went and violated the law by not disclosing exactly how much of your money they wasted.

Like so many animal experimenters, these rogue lab white coats think they’re entitled to your money—but they don’t think they have to follow federal transparency laws.

They like to watch. They don’t like to be seen.

It’s time to flip that script.

Taxpayers have the right to know who’s paying the bills… and who’s cashing the checks.

So we are working with Waste Warriors in the House and the Senate to protect animals and taxpayers by passing the Cost Openness and Spending Transparency Act—the COST Act—a law that would require putting a public price tag on all taxpayer-funded projects and withhold your money when they don’t comply.

Please use your voice to tell Congress you do want them to pass the COST Act, to permanently require all taxpayer-funded animal experimenters to publicly disclose the cost of their wasteful projects!