The National Institutes of Health under director Jay Bhattacharya continues to be keep funding Harvard research involving the torture of baby monkeys despite having announced it was terminating it.
Bhattacharya has resisted making several major changes at NIH since the dissolution of Elon Musk’s cost cutting project the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in 2025. The appointee of President Donald Trump has celebrated Anthony Fauci’s Biden-era pardon, maintained NIH funding at status quo levels, fired new aides brought on to reform the institution, further integrated the military and gain-of-function research — and protected and even promoted career bureaucrats who conduct research at odds with conservative values.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, who oversees the implementation of Trump’s agenda across federal agencies, confronted Bhattacharya in a heated meeting in the White House with Trump present, according to several news reports.
The Trump administration is seeking steeper cuts to Harvard, per the reports. But Bhattacharya has been a mentee of Harvard President Alan M. Garber for three decades and maintains close communications with several professors in Cambridge who oppose the Trump administration, according to the Harvard Crimson.
With renewed White House scrutiny of Bhattacharya’s leadership at the NIH, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) unveiled a new website Monday on a key priority: ending animal testing.
But there’s a problem: not all of its claims appear to be true.
“NIH has terminated funding at Harvard University for studies that included sewing the eyes of young monkeys shut,” a May 2025 X post from the Institutes states. “Under @POTUS’s leadership, we’re ending cruel, wasteful, and taxpayer-funded animal experiments—from baby monkeys at Harvard to cats and dogs in military labs.”
The Institutes’ website falsely touts this termination of research by Harvard Medical School neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone, whose studies on visual perception centers on young monkeys and “interventions that disrupt early visual experience,” as she describes on the lab’s website. These “interventions” involve depriving them of their mothers and blinding them at birth, sometimes by suturing their eyelids shut. Livingstone studies their deterioration through electrode arrays implanted into their skulls, even while insisting the animals are treated well.
Bhattacharya did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. Livingstone and the HHS did each not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
The Livingstone lab has inflamed advocates for the humane treatment of animals for years. The late famed primatologist Jane Goodall was among its critics.
Twelve years ago, former NIH Director Francis Collins acknowledged privately that so-called “maternal deprivation” experiments on baby monkeys were “third rate” and outdated with modern methods, even while externally arguing they were indispensable. Collins’ closest aide warned him that terminating any NIH research project would set a “dangerous precedent.”
Bhattacharya has shown a similar reluctance to relinquish any NIH funding, and public records show that taxpayer funding continues to flow to Livingstone’s lab through four separate grants, including a new $850,000 tranche earlier this month. They also include a multi-year grant in May 2025 that funds her research until 2029.
HHS announced new initiatives on stopping animal testing on Monday.
But White Coat Waste Project — the advocacy group that first drew attention to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Anthony Fauci’s funding of beagle experimentation — argues that HHS should simply turn off the funding spigot.
“The lights are still on at Margaret Livingstone’s Harvard primate lab — and [HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] spending spree is keeping them on,” said Anthony Bellotti, president of White Coat Waste Project, in a statement to the DCNF. “Just yesterday, HHS launched a new PR website claiming to have ‘cut’ Livingstone’s baby-monkey blinding experiments. … NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya was doling out more tax money to his friends at Harvard to keep Livingstone’s monkey torture lab afloat.”
Harvard has defended the research by saying that animal models can lead to cures without naming specific therapies generated by the Livingstone lab.
“The humane and regulated use of animal models in biomedical research remains indispensable for understanding the biological processes that give rise to disease, for designing new therapies and interventions to improve health, and for ensuring such treatments are safe and effective,” the university said in a 2022 statement.
Livingstone said in a 2022 statement that her research has informed possible treatments for tremor, Alzheimer’s disease and glioblastoma.
(DCNF)
