This Activist Group Tapped Into Partisan COVID Politics To Make Big Trouble For Anthony Fauci And The NIH

The White Coat Waste Project has pulled the “lab leak” strings and channeled right-wing anger over COVID to pursue its goal of defunding animal experiments backed by the federal government.

Originally published by BuzzFeed News   |   written by Peter Aldhous

As much of the United States entered COVID lockdowns in April 2020, a tiny group that campaigns against federal funding for animal experiments spotted an opportunity.

Speculation was swirling in right-leaning media that the virus behind the pandemic had emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, rather than from wildlife sold for food in the city’s markets. As it happened, the White Coat Waste Project had been looking into taxpayer money going to labs in China, including in Wuhan. The group’s founder had strong contacts with Republican politicians and had launched the group with the mission of getting conservatives into animal activism.

The White Coat Waste Project sprung into action, persuading DailyMail.com to run a story saying the US government had funded the lab. Then all hell broke loose.

Then-president Donald Trump, keen to blame China for the pandemic, was soon involved. After prodding from the conservative outlet Newsmax at a press conference, his administration terminated the grant from the National Institutes of Health, which had been awarded to a New York–based nonprofit called the EcoHealth Alliance.

Since then, the controversy over whether the COVID pandemic started with a “lab leak” has escalated into a ferocious fight, with conflicting narratives that paint EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology either as out-of-control scientists who may have caused the pandemic through inherently risky research or as the victims of politically motivated conspiracy theories, unfairly vilified as the architects of a catastrophe that they worked for years to prevent by studying the risks posed by bat coronaviruses.

Two years on, and with the scientific trail going cold, it’s possible that the mystery of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, may never be conclusively solved. But thousands of pages of NIH emails and other documents released to BuzzFeed News through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show how the White Coat Waste Project rode the wave of partisan pandemic politics to serve its cause, and in the process triggered a storm that engulfed EcoHealth, one of the world’s largest groups studying potentially dangerous animal viruses. They also show how the NIH, a behemoth that spends more than $40 billion annually on biomedical research, stumbled under the political pressure the White Coat Waste Project brought to bear.

The White Coat Waste Project has subsequently channeled right-wing anger toward Anthony Fauci, the public face of COVID policies including mask and vaccine mandates, accusing his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the NIH, of funding “beagle torture.” The White Coat Waste Project is writing a controversial new activist playbook — and it’s unclear whether anyone can control the forces that it has helped to unleash.

“They jumped on the bandwagon of how I have become public enemy number one of the far right,” Fauci told BuzzFeed News. “If you engage and try and push back on that, it very often only gives it legs. And then it becomes even worse of a problem.”

White Coat Waste Project’s Anthony Bellotti

Poring over polling data, Bellotti could see that there was a big gap between Democrats and Republicans on the issue. Democrats were much more likely to support campaigns against animal experiments, which had often focused on corporate labs, and Republicans tended to back the research. So Bellotti crafted a message calculated to bring the missing Republicans on board, focusing on government spending. He avoids the label “animal rights,” and has cast the White Coat Waste Project as a “taxpayer watchdog uniting liberty-lovers and animal-lovers.”

In addition to mobilizing support from the political right, there was another reason to target government spending: Congress has the power to shut it down. “The goal isn’t to change hearts and minds, it’s to win the fight,” Bellotti told BuzzFeed News. “We had to get to the root cause of the problem, which was the government spending.”

The group didn’t really take off until 2016, when Bellotti hired Justin Goodman, a former director of laboratory investigations with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, to head the White Coat Waste Project’s advocacy efforts. Goodman started digging into government databases and filing FOIA requests to identify projects that the group could campaign to defund.

Even before the pandemic, the White Coat Waste Project scored some victories. An early campaign, launched in a report called “Spending to Death,” highlighted experiments involving dogs in federal labs, including one studying the effects of blood transfusions in dogs with pneumonia in which some of the animals died. The group then turned up the heat on the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia, focusing on experiments into heart disease in which dogs were run on treadmills after their heart rhythms were disrupted using implanted pacemaker devices. The White Coat Waste Project’s multiyear effort to shut down Veterans Affairs dog research eventually led Congress to restrict spending on the work and demand explicit approval from the secretary for veterans affairs for new dog experiments by the agency.

Fast-forward to April 2020, and the White Coat Waste Project’s findings about NIH funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology were starting to find a receptive audience. On April 11, the group succeeded in getting DailyMail.com, the website of a British tabloid newspaper with a large online readership in the US, to run the story: “REVEALED: U.S. Government Gave $3.7 Million Grant to Wuhan Lab at Center of Coronavirus Leak Scrutiny.” ($3.7 million was actually the total sum paid over six years to EcoHealth, gleaned by Goodman from the NIH’s grants database; in fact, less than $600,000went to the Wuhan institute.)

The White Coat Waste Project started reaching out to Republicans in Congress — and the NIH was soon reeling. By April 13, NIH officials were scrambling to respond to a request for information from the office of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, which had forwarded an email from Goodman noting the press coverage of the White Coat Waste Project’s “troubling find” about the Wuhan institute. In that email, Goodman noted: “We’re working with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and others on a sign-on letter about this.”

Two days later, the alarm bells were ringing at the very top of the NIH. Lawrence Tabak, deputy to Francis Collins, then director of the NIH, wrote to his boss and Fauci, whose institute had awarded the grant, emphasizing in bold that the Trump White House was on the warpath: “The WH has strongly embraced concerns raised by Congressman Gaetz who is publicly criticizing HHS/NIH for funding the Wuhan laboratory’s bat research.”

“I reached Tony, he is now informed,” Collins replied, confirming Fauci was in the loop.

Then, on April 17, a Newsmax reporter asked Trump about the project, repeating the false claim that $3.7 million had gone to the Wuhan institute. “We will end that grant very quickly,” Trump said.

The gain-of-function fight had also intensified the pressure on Fauci, who was by now a hate figure for many on the political right. In November 2021, he and Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul clashed angrily in a Senate hearing, as Paul accused Fauci of changing the definition of gain-of-function and funding dangerous research in Wuhan. “He is egregiously incorrect,” Fauci responded. In January, they locked horns in another hearing, featuring an extraordinary exchange in which Fauci accused Paul of jeopardizing his personal safety for political gain.

“What happens when he gets out and accuses me of things that are completely untrue is that all of a sudden that kindles the crazies out there, and I have threats upon my life, harassment of my family and my children,” Fauci said.

By the time of these acrimonious exchanges, the White Coat Waste Project had embarked on another campaign that made Fauci its main focus. In July 2021, the White Coat Waste Project launched its “BeagleGate” campaign, highlighting research on dogs funded by the NIAID, with a blog post headlined: “WCW Exposé: Fauci Spent $424K on Beagle Experiments, Dogs Bitten to Death by Flies.”

The next month, the White Coat Waste Project accused Fauci of funding “beagle torture” in Tunisia, referring to a paper published in July 2021 investigating whether the biting sand flies that spread visceral leishmaniasis, a potentially fatal disease, preferred to feed on dogs already infected with the parasites that cause the condition.

The story really took off on Oct. 24, 2021, when 24 members of Congress from both parties, led by Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, wrote to Fauci protesting “costly, cruel, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs.” Fauci’s nemesis, Rand Paul, wasn’t among the signatories, but weighed in with a tweet touting the White Coat Waste Project’s original blog post:

The Washington Post later reported that Fauci’s office received 3,600 calls in 36 hours, causing his assistant to stop answering the phone for two weeks. The newspaper linked the onslaught to “a campaign by a little-known animal rights group called the White Coat Waste Project.”

The NIAID tried to address the controversy, stating that it didn’t actually fund the Tunisian beagle research paper — which in November 2021 was corrected to remove reference to a grant from the institute, which had been awarded to a researcher at Ohio State University for related work. “NIAID was listed as a courtesy because it had supported other leishmaniasis research in the past,” a spokesperson for the university told BuzzFeed News. But that correction seemed only to give the White Coat Waste Project more ammunition. “Once again…color us unconvinced,” it wrote in a later blog post disputing the NIAID’s denial of funding the work.

The White Coat Waste Project’s critics argue that its demonization of Fauci, seemingly calculated to channel existing right-wing anger with the government scientist seen as the public face of mask and COVID vaccine mandates, has taken animal activism into scary territory.

“They take a tiny sliver of truth, and then around that they build this highly emotional somewhat fictional narrative to build their case,” Jim Newman, director of strategic communications with Americans for Medical Progress, which argues that animal experiments are essential to develop new treatments and vaccines, told BuzzFeed News. Animal activists have long been accused of cherry-picking facts and ignoring the goals of research to present animal experiments in the worst possible light. But portraying individuals as cruel villains in the current febrile political climate is “a very dangerous direction to be headed,” Newman said.

“Of course, the pro-animal experimentation lobby hates that we hold government bosses accountable for funneling tax dollars to cruel and wasteful animal tests,” Goodman said. “We generally don’t run campaigns targeting individual taxpayer-funded animal experimenters to respect their privacy and because we question the approach’s effectiveness, but federal agency bosses are public figures and fair game.”

Threats to Fauci’s life, which began well before the White Coat Waste Project’s BeagleGate campaign, have been widely documented. Daszak, too, has faced security scares, including an incident in August 2020 when an envelope containing a mysterious white powder reportedly turned up at his home. “I get death threats regularly and we get crank calls at home trying to keep us awake at night,” Daszak told BuzzFeed News.

The White Coat Waste Project stresses that it opposes violence and issued a statement in October 2021 saying it had no quarrel with Fauci over his advice on COVID policies. “You could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him on COVID response and go toe-to-toe with him on other issues,” said Goodman, who makes no apology for the group’s decision to make Fauci the focus of the BeagleGate campaign. “Because he became a household name as the pandemic progressed, sure, it created an opportunity to go after him for animal testing in a way that would really make waves.” 

As the White Coat Waste Project has seized its opportunities and gained a higher public profile, the group has itself come under scrutiny. In February, the Campaign for Accountability filed a complaint with the IRS and the Federal Election Commission, alleging that the White Coat Waste Project had coordinated with the White Coat Waste Political Action Committee, founded in 2017, in breach of regulations prohibiting tax-exempt nonprofits from engaging in political campaign activities.

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Bellotti declined to answer questions about the political action committee, which he said was a separate organization. Goodman later sent a statement describing the Campaign for Accountability’s complaint as a “politically-motivated, baseless, and frivolous attack,” noting: “The WCW Project does not fund activities of the distinct, all-volunteer WCW PAC.”

Despite the partisan dynamics that have driven the White Coat Waste Project’s campaign against funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Bellotti told BuzzFeed News that his group’s goal remains finding ways to unite Democrats and Republicans on defunding animal experiments backed by the US government. “We didn’t know when we launched this that it would get partisan in the way it did,” he said.

The White Coat Waste Project’s latest campaign, again tapping into concern about US taxpayer dollars going to the nation’s most powerful adversaries, might just have broader political appeal. Less than a week after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it published a new blog post: “Breaking: WCW Discovers NIH Pays For Cruel Kitten Experiments…in Russia!” 

Peter Aldhous is a reporter for BuzzFeed News.