'Don Corleone' Fauci's legacy targeted by new NIH chief, explosive claims by 'decades-long insider'

Don Corleone is out. St. Francis of Assisi is in.

The National Institutes of Health is morphing from Godfather – whose portrait allegedly hung over the desk of longtime National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci – to Good Shepherd under Director Jay Bhattacharya, the "fringe epidemiologist" who preached to his own church not to treat COVID-19 infection as sin.

Bhattacharya put an end to the gruesome puppy experiments approved by the previous regime, which especially dogged Fauci after he retired two years ago, while NIH is "reducing," if not phasing out, other forms of animal research.

Animal welfare groups are swooning at the reversal under a Republican administration, with NIH over the past week prioritizing "human-based research technologies" that do not subject humans to testing and eliminating its last beagle lab, following animal testing phaseouts by the Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency.

President Trump also signed an executive order Monday banning federal funding for gain-of-function research, which may have caused the COVID-19 pandemic from a lab leak in China and which Fauci denied funding under oath, causing more celebration.

"Every American should be outraged that their hard-earned tax dollars were used by mad scientists to engineer more deadly and transmissible coronaviruses," said House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican.

"Fauci may have retired and been pardoned, but this is all part of his shameful legacy, and we’re working overtime to dismantle it with Congress and the Trump administration," said animal-cruelty watchdog White Coat Waste Project Senior Vice President Justin Goodman.

It's just the tip of scrutiny for Fauci, the record-breaking federal pensioner who doubled his wealth during the pandemic and whom Trump once said should run for political office but became a new cross-ideological villain for approving retch-inducing animal experiments.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said she "created a kind of special teams group" known as the Director's Initiative Group to discern the truth about COVID's origin and whether Fauci lied under oath by denying "over and over" in congressional testimony that he funded gain-of-function research, on Megyn Kelly's podcast.

'Bloodless revolution in public health'

Bhattacharya told Fox & Friends Weekend that NIH "got rid of all the beagle experiments" on its campus – the fruit of a years-long campaign by WCW – and that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals gave him flowers in gratitude.

"It’s very easy, for instance, to cure Alzheimer’s in mice. But those things don’t translate to humans," said Bhattacharya, whose office will incorporate a new Office of Research Innovation, Validation, and Application.

NIH's April 29 announcement said a plausible explanation is "differences in anatomy, physiology, lifespan, and disease characteristics" between animals and humans. It plans to use "organoids, tissue chips, and other in vitro systems" and computational models that "simulate complex biological human systems, disease pathways, and drug interactions."

The NIH Clinical Center had a project for “stress-induced and sepsis-induced cardiomyopathy,” which were the last in-house experiments that induced pain and distress in beagles, which has now been terminated, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. Medical experiments have been conducted on beagles because they have docile temperaments.

WCW has played a leading role in congressional Republicans' turn against taxpayer-funded animal research, including the Biden administration's approval of $10 million for transgender animal experiments and painful puppy experiments in Tunisia and China, including in military-tied labs.

"No other animal advocacy group has shut down federal dog labs in nearly a generation, or federal feline labs in two generations," WCW crowed Sunday, claiming it convinced the first Trump administration to close the feds' largest cat testing lab and last year preempted NIH's plan to resurrect the "Kitten Slaughterhouse" at the University of California Davis.

Its nine-year investigation found NIH killed 2,133 beagles in septic shock experiments since 1986. The experiments gained attention on social media and in Congress four years ago when WCW found evidence that NIH sent $375,800 to a Tunisian lab for experiments that induced sand flies to feed on beagles locked in cages in order to study leishmaniasis.

The Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action also took credit for the "reforms set in motion," through their successful lobbying to end a Depression-era animal testing mandate. 

"These landmark declarations by research-based institutions constitute a bloodless revolution in public health and animal welfare in our nation," said the group's president, Wayne Pacelle.

Humane World for Animals and Humane World Action Fund, formerly the Humane Society and its legislative fund, took a victory lap for its decades of advocacy as well. 

“This is the moonshot many of us as long-time advocates have been pushing for with NIH, FDA and EPA," especially the coordination of non-animal research, fund President Sara Amundson said.

Science magazine rained on the reforms by arguing the cuts to indirect cost agreements for federal research funding could lead to mass euthanization of research animals.

'I sometimes caught a favored capo slouching down'

A "decades-long NIH insider" made the Fauci-Godfather comparison in an essay Sunday for Senate corruption investigator-turned-journalist Paul Thacker's newsletter. (Fauci has said a line from the 1972 film guided his career.)

"When I entered his office, I couldn’t help but notice a portrait of The Godfather hung above his desk – Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone, not Al Pacino as the young, upstart Michael – a fitting tribute to his persona and leadership style" despite Fauci publicly citing Michael as inspiration, the unnamed infectious diseases researcher wrote.

"Upon entering NIH meetings, I sometimes caught a favored capo slouching down in his chair after dutifully raising Fauci’s own, so that, feet dangling, the diminutive Don would appear the tallest man in the room," the author wrote, adding "the Boss often humiliated staff members, both women and men, in expletive-laden tirades."

Thacker declined to further specify the insider's closeness to Fauci, telling Just the News the "senior" researcher attended Fauci meetings and went to his office. 

Just the News has been unable to verify the Don Corleone portrait claim, which has not been previously reported. Neither NIH nor Fauci's lawyers answered queries.

Most of the essay criticizes Fauci's role in furthering gain-of-function research, starting with his denial that NIAID funded it based on a narrow definition the agency used internally for grant reviews. NIH quietly removed a broader definition from a public page following scrutiny.

"I realized that the Fauci-led NIAID had participated in a classic Washington ploy: satisfy your critics by pretending to regulate activity that can harm the public, while actually letting your friends do whatever they want," the insider wrote.

The scientist recounted feeling outrage after reading the "Proximal Origin" of COVID paper, covertly shaped by Fauci, "line by line" and realizing the authors "completely ignored the possibility of serial passaging," in which a virus genetically adapts through repeated exposure to lab animals or cell lines without any need for "direct genetic manipulation."

"I have no idea how ignoring something so obvious could make it pass peer review and get published in a prestigious journal like Nature Medicine," the author wrote.