The sheer ridiculousness of this headline would likely make for some fine satire if the underlying story wasn’t so disturbing. The deeper we look into COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci’s background at the National Institutes of Health, the more unsettling history seems to be revealed. We recently learned about horrible experiments performed on helpless beagles and that was enough to make my blood boil. But now, as the Free Beacon reports this week, there were other animal experiments going on that simply don’t seem to make any sense. One of them involved some alleged HIV/AIDS research where male monkeys were injected with female hormones to stimulate some sort of transgender response in them, supposedly to help determine why lesbians report higher rates of HIV infections. And no, this information did not come from The Onion.

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s division of the National Institutes of Health paid over $200,000 during the coronavirus pandemic for researchers to study why transgender women have high rates of HIV by injecting male monkeys with female hormones.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in December 2021 gave Scripps Research $205,562 for the study, which aims to determine why transgender women have high rates of HIV. As part of the study, researchers subject male monkeys ti feminizing hormone therapy to study how it impacts the monkeys’ immune systems, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Fauci has overseen rampant animal testing since he took over the NIAID in 1984.

While I’ve been somewhat conflicted about it, the subject of animal testing has always bothered me greatly, probably because of all of the time my wife and I have spent working with animal rescue groups. I understand that there are some medical breakthroughs that wouldn’t happen without at least some laboratory testing involving animals, but that doesn’t make it any more pleasant to consider.

But my tolerance for such practices only goes so far as to give scientists a pass if the need for the testing is dire and the maximum steps are taken to ensure that the animals don’t suffer any more than absolutely necessary during the process. Neither of those conditions seems to have been met in this case. In fact, it’s questionable whether such testing could even produce any usable results.

One neuroscientist interviewed for the linked report described these tests performed on rhesus monkeys taken from a South Carolina island as being, “yet another pointless, wasteful monkey torture experiment.”

The reason she gave for this assessment was the fact that rhesus monkeys can’t contract HIV. They are only susceptible to Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, a milder strain of the virus. And rhesus monkeys are not good models to replace human beings in medical studies to begin with. Injecting male rhesus monkeys with female hormones to try to somehow get them to simulate lesbian tendencies simply sounds insane.

This is what Fauci’s agency was spending nearly a quarter-million dollars of taxpayer money on last month? And this wasn’t the only test program of this type that the NIH was funding. They’ve spent billions of dollars in total on HIV studies involving these types of monkeys, a species that is incapable of contracting AIDS. If the final goal of the study was to determine why human lesbians are hit with HIV/AIDS more often than the rest of the population, why would you use male monkeys in the study to begin with? Did they really believe that some injections of the monkey equivalent of estrogen would turn them into lesbians?

Perhaps there needs to be a serious congressional investigation into the NIH that ranges far beyond just the institute’s response to the COVID pandemic. There are some strange things going on there that are being funded by the taxpayers.

UPDATE: It’s worth noting that White Coat Waste Project was among the first to report on this subject.