The sky is falling for some anonymous National Institutes of Health employees, scientists and institutions that receive federal research grants in response to the Trump administration's 12-day "pause" on document releases from the Department of Health and Human Services, which halts the work of NIH grant review panels.

Careers are at risk, innovation is at stake, life-saving research could be threatened, they say. But a pause might be good for man's best friend.

The animal-cruelty watchdog that exposed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' funding of gruesome experiments on puppies worldwide, with which its former director Anthony Fauci was confronted at a House hearing last year, published more records of federally funded puppy experiments this week, this time in China.

The Freedom of Information Act production to the White Coat Waste Project shows federal contracts for research in Chinese labs through May for "the evaluation of pharmacokinetics of compounds from dystonia" using beagles, mice and rats.

NIH kicked in $124,200 and Department of Defense an unspecified amount, the latter only mentioned in a single sentence: NIH's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences "has received a DoD award to specifically fund animal studies delineated in this award." 

Researchers would use about 300 beagles a week, chosen because they are "docile, cute and easy to domesticate," the applicant's solicitation says.

The dry scientific language obscures the cruelty of the experiments, testing "poison" drugs on "puppies as young as 8 months old" by repeatedly shoving tubes in their mouths and restraining them "for hours on end," WCW said, posting pictures of the poor pups. 

Another contract from NIH's National Institute on Drug Abuse shows $108,000 spent on 240,000 mice and rats in the research. WCW Senior Vice President Justin Goodman pointed Just the News to another $2.1 million in subawards to the same contractor, Pharmaron, in 2024, in another tab on the same USASpending.gov page.

"In all, we’ve uncovered that at least 26 animal laboratories in China" – some controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and linked to its military – "have active approvals to receive taxpayer dollars from the NIH, DOD, and other government agencies," WCW said. 

Fauci at his hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic last year played down the importance of his admission that he never read grant applications as director before approving them and called the previous puppy experiments "humane."

Goodman urged President Trump "to pick up where he left off and defund all of China’s animal labs once and for all," referring to his first-term cutoff of funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, judged the more likely source of SARS-CoV-2 by the FBI, Department of Energy and — disclosed this week — the CIA.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., also called on Trump to cut foreign funding of such research in response to WCW's findings.

"Especially following the CIA’s determination that COVID came from a lab in Wuhan, we must clip the wings on the batty studies of pandemic potential," Ernst said. “It's alarming that American tax dollars are still funding cruel dog testing and other animal labs in Communist China" after the House COVID panel exposed and cut off Wuhan funding, Malliotakis said.

The Department of Health and Human Services' pause on documents and communications until Feb. 1, allegedly including the work of NIH "study sections" that make funding decisions, prompted wailing and gnashing of teeth in the science media.

STAT News conveyed the fears of "more than two dozen researchers at institutions nationwide" that a short wait for clarity on the new administration's research priorities "has cast many early-career scientists into limbo" and could threaten "medical and biotechnology innovation" in the U.S. long term.

“It's so devastating and short-sighted," Hofstra University psychologist Emily Barkley-Levenson told The Scientist. University of Kentucky neuroscientist Shannon Macauley said COVID-19 was less disruptive to the grant review process.

"The various directives have shaken the vast community of extramural scientists NIH supports," Science reported, quoting a senior NIH official calling them "devastating." 

Anonymous NIH staffers told Forbes this was the first time "politics" has entered the agency and the intention of the pause was to "scare us, to demoralize us, and to set science back … our job is literally to enable research to save lives, what the heck?”

Former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker cited his own sources within NIH's upper ranks to criticize the portrayal of the pause.

"This is a manipulation tactic by the NIH Director’s office to tar the new administration," an official in that office told Thacker. "The memo doesn’t say anything about private meetings, and they shut down these study sections to scare everyone into believing [research] studies will shut down and labs will shutter."

The communications pause didn't stop NIH from confirming to STAT the appointment of its new acting director, Matthew Memoli, formerly director of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases Clinical Studies Unit who won an agency award for a national study of undiagnosed COVID cases, until Trump's nominee Jay Bhattacharya is confirmed.

University of Pittsburgh Associate Senior Vice Chancellor Jeremy Berg, a former NIH institute director, told STAT that Memoli's criticisms of the COVID response were "scientifically driven" but worried that he wasn't qualified to be director, having little experience applying for funding before joining NIH, and having got the job by publicly pushing back on mandates and Fauci.

Memoli quickly issued a memo to staff clarifying clinical trials had not stopped at NIH and for funding recipients and they can continue related actions for research predating Trump's inauguration, but only promised "additional guidance" would soon follow on pending grants.

He's a vocal critic of the government's response to COVID who opposes vaccine mandates, is himself unvaccinated and has complained that reporters who interviewed him during COVID ignored the context he gave about past flu pandemics.

He has blamed "money and expediency" for much of the reluctance by current and hopeful grant recipients to undertake potentially contrary research to federal narratives, and said he himself has been accused of promoting vaccine hesitancy by citing federal data.

University of California San Francisco epidemiologist Vinay Prasad waved off the handwringing in the science community over the alleged pause on NIH study sections, calling them "groups of mediocre scientists" based on low citations of their papers.

"NIH seeks mediocre ideas that tread along established lines and not highly novel views," he wrote. "The government cannot be a welfare program for everybody doing low quality, low credibility, irreproducible, low value of information research."

In a subsequent essay, Prasad said the study section membership reflects NIH's fealty to "woke" science. "There are thousands of NIH grants on the topics of diversity. Many are redundant, merely documenting things we already know" but not "useful solutions … we need better therapies, period."