Fauci Spent Your Tax Dollars Studying Transgender Monkeys

National Institutes of Health paid $205,000 to study transgender monkeys just as the omicron variant of COVID-19 was sending untold numbers of Americans to the hospital.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — the division headed up by celebrity medical spokesmodel Anthony “Doctor” Fauci — gave your tax dollars to Scripps Research to try and find out why transgender women are so prone to HIV infection.

I know what you’re asking: “Who amongst us, for 200 large, wouldn’t put a monkey in a dress?”

For half a million, I’d dress up with it.

Not that I’m into anything weird, mind you. It would take at least a cool million for me to live stream the event.

But as it turns out, the noted puppy torturer wasn’t satisfied just playing simian dress-up.

Since transgender monkeys aren’t actually a thing — or are at least very difficult to find outside of sketchy urban hipster neighborhoods — Scripps had to make their own.

In December, the century-old research nonprofit received the money to subject “male monkeys to feminizing hormone therapy to study how it impacts the monkeys’ immune systems,” according to the Washington Free Beacon.

There’s just one problem. OK, there are so many problems we’ll never count them all, but the most serious problem might be that monkeys can’t catch AIDS.

While it pains me to quote PETA approvingly, here’s what the organization has to say about the matter:

Humans are the only primates who contract HIV and develop AIDS. Chimpanzees don’t. Monkeys don’t. To get around this sticky issue, experimenters infect macaques with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a virus unique to African primates, or they use an engineered SIV/HIV concoction. The idea is that macaques can serve as a surrogate model for HIV infection—except they can’t.

Experimenters have developed dozens of vaccines. Only five have gotten as far as human trials, and all of them have failed. One of them even increased the likelihood of HIV infection in humans. After one of the human vaccine trials failed in 2018, Fauci acknowledged that the positive results of a macaque study he had been involved in “might [have been] a fluke.”

So, after decades of failed experiments on regular monkeys, NIAID has doubled down by making transgender monkeys to experiment on.

Clearly, the Department of Health and Human Services — and Washington in general — has far too much money to spend.

And not enough judgment to stop spending it on monkey business.