This past November, 43 monkeys escaped from a notorious taxpayer-funded South Carolina monkey lab called Alpha Genesis. The company runs facilities in South Carolina confining over 10,000 primates, including 3,300 on Fauci’s Monkey Island. It also performs painful experiments on many monkeys and ships others to taxpayer-funded labs.
We documented how in 2024 alone, Alpha Genesis raked in at least $19 million in taxpayer funding—all from the National Institutes of Health. In all, they’ve received over $110 million in direct federal funding from NIH and other agencies since 2008.
As we told the press and lawmakers back in November, these figures do not include the millions of additional public funds the firm secures indirectly from tax-funded labs that buy monkeys for experiments.
Now, we’ve uncovered how one university white coat funded with over $20 million from the NIH and National Science Foundation is buying primates from Alpha Genesis and abusing them in cruel tests conducted in collaboration with animal experimenters in Iran and China.
A 2024 publication co-authored by a Vanderbilt University experimenter and collaborators at Iran’s Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences and the Iran University of Science and Technology details a test in which two monkeys obtained from Alpha Genesis had holes drilled into their skulls, electrodes implanted into their brains, and were locked in restraint chairs and forced to stare at computer screens.
According to the paper, the 3 Iranian experimenters “conceptualized the current study,” the tax-funded Vanderbilt experimenter “designed the behavioral task and provided the data” and the Iranian team “analyzed the data and prepared figures” and “wrote the article.” It goes on to state that, “All authors interpreted the results, reviewed, edited, and approved the final version of the article”
Not only is this wasteful and cruel, but these primate tests may violate U.S. sanctions against Iran that prohibit collaboration on designing experiments, sharing data, and preparing manuscripts without special government permission. Criminal and civil penalties for violating these sanctions carry fines of up to $1 million and up to 20 years in jail.
The same tax-funded Vanderbilt animal experimenter and his colleagues also collaborated with the Chinese Communist Party-controlled Sun Yat Sen University on abusive tests on primates obtained from Alpha Genesis. That project was funded with tax money via the NIH and Department of Veterans Affairs.
Sun Yat-Sen University, whose disturbing videotaped beagle experiments we’ve also exposed, is listed on the Department of Defense and Department of Commerce lists of sanctioned organizations that threaten national security.
Is this how you want your money spent?
We’re working with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) to pass the PRIMATES Act to defund painful testing on monkeys and urging the Trump Administration to stop tax dollars from flowing to China, Iran, and other foreign enemies’ animal labs.