The Food and Drug Administration is buying up young baboons with taxpayer dollars so researchers can infect and kill them for research in Maryland.
White Coat Waste Project has released a new report detailing how the agency issued a $368,626 purchase order on August 31 to buy 20 baboons for pertussis experiments at its Maryland primate laboratory.
An active protocol allows the lab to use up to 48 animals.
Some of the baboons will receive experimental vaccines or antibodies. Others will get no protection at all. Then researchers will pump the bacteria that cause whooping cough into their windpipes and noses.
The primates will be subjected to violent coughing, vomiting, breathing problems, fever, weight loss, nasal discharge, and weeks of illness.
Staff will draw blood and swab noses and throats again and again.
Some of the animals will be killed and dissected so researchers can examine their lungs, windpipes, and lymph nodes.
That is a lot of suffering for a disease America already vaccinates against, and taxpayers are being forced to spend more than a third of a million dollars on it.
The news of the purchase order comes as the Trump administration has made significant moves to shift away from animal testing.
The Department of Veterans Affairs eliminated its primate laboratories. The CDC moved to shut monkey labs and send survivors to sanctuaries. NIH closed the last beagle experiments on its own campus. EPA revived a plan to end mammal use in chemical testing by 2035. Congress even barred painful Department of Defense research on cats and dogs.
The public message has been clear: stop the cruelty and waste and use modern methods.
The labs and researchers apparently did not get the message.
Last week, Gateway Pundit reported that White Coat Waste documented more than $225 million in new NIH funding for dog and cat experiments awarded, supplemented, renewed, or extended since February 2025.
The total climbed from about $150 million in June.
Nearly $98 million went to pharmaceutical companies running dog tests.
An earlier WCW review found more than $30 million in new fiscal 2026 NIH money for primate projects, including work that infects monkeys with dangerous pathogens and force-feeds experimental drugs.
The public is being told that there is a phase-out, but many of these agencies seem to be doing a restock instead.
White Coat Waste noted in their report:
The FDA’s latest purchase stands in stark contrast to the progress WCW has already driven at the agency.
In 2018, following pressure from WCW, the FDA canceled nicotine-addiction experiments on baby monkeys and retired the survivors to a sanctuary.
WCW kept the pressure on and subsequently shut down the FDA’s largest primate laboratory and led the advocacy and lobbying campaign that slashed the agency’s overall primate testing by 63 percent.
WCW also compelled the FDA to enact its first-ever agency-wide lab animal retirement policy, allowing monkeys and other animals who survive experiments to be relocated to rescues and sanctuaries.
The WCW policy victory has saved tax dollars and animals’ lives. Last year, the FDA retired several baboons from its Maryland lab to a sanctuary.
The new purchase order shows why pressure still matters.
If the government is serious about replacing animal tests with modern tools, why is it buying another shipment of young baboons to cough, vomit, and, in some cases, die on a dissection table?
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