The VA dog labs are filled with painful and cruel experiments

With the recent talk of a troop surge in Afghanistan, as well as the Trump administration’s activist legislative agenda on veterans issues, there has been lots of talk about keeping the promise to America’s veterans. Most often, that promise refers to U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA’s) motto, a quotation from Lincoln’s second inaugural address, “to care for him who has borne the battle, his widow, and his orphan.”

For starters, VA must do a better job eliminating the deceit, waste, and abuse that is pervasive across the agency, from manipulating wait times, to letting veterans languish without proper care, to retaliating against whistleblowers.

{mosads}Just this week, whistleblower Christopher Shea Wilkes wrote to the White House expressing his concern regarding over 2,000 veterans waiting for appointments at a VA Medical Center in Louisiana. Wilkes, who is an Army veteran and one of the original whistleblowers of the 2014 patient wait-list scandal, noted that the VA continues to be plagued by “a combination of burdensome bureaucracy, lazy employees, and poor leadership.”

In an effort to address the problem, President Trump signed an executive order creating a new VA Stop Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Task Force (STOP FWA).

The VA defines fraud as using false statements, pretenses or promises to obtain government money. It defines waste as the misuse of resources. And it defines abuse as actions that result in unnecessary costs to the healthcare system.

One program that unfortunately fits these definitions is the VA’s controversial dog research, which the House unanimously voted to defund last month.

In official statements, interviews, internal memos, congressional briefings and elsewhere, VA has vigorously defended its continued use of taxpayer funds for painful dog experiments with sweeping claims about their alleged necessity that are simply not supported by the evidence.

Specifically, the VA has claimed, “canine research is essential to developing crucial medical advancements to help veterans,” and that “one of the most effective ways for VA to discover new treatments for diseases that affect veterans and non-veterans alike is the continuation of responsible animal research.”

Fact check: the National Institutes of Health’s website promoting high-tech alternatives to animal research states that, “approximately 30 percent of promising medications have failed in human clinical trials because they are found to be toxic despite promising pre-clinical studies in animal models.

About 60 percent of candidate drugs fail due to lack of efficacy.” A scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory recently said, “Historically, drug trials have been done in many different types of animals. Some of them have passed animal testing, but in human trials they’ve failed or even killed people.”

For the VA to portray painful dog experiments as “essential” and “effective” when there is a greater than 90 percent chance they’re going to fail to help veterans — or might even end up killing them — is undoubtedly a false promise and pretense intended specifically to secure continued support and funding from Congress.

The mischaracterizations don’t end there. The more fundamental falsehoods VA is spreading are in addition to it publicly denying basic, easily-verifiable facts about its dog experiments like that is uses puppies — it does — and that dogs are exposed to pain and distress — they are.

There’s been more overt abuse and waste in the VA’s dog labs, too.  The VA’s Office of Research Oversight recently found that the dog labs at the McGuire VA Hospital in Richmond killed dogs with botched surgeries, violated protocols, conducted unapproved procedures, failed to keep adequate records, and had a deficient whistleblower policy. The report noted that for years the McGuire VA couldn’t even keep an accurate count of how many dogs it used.

Additionally, a whistleblower from the facility came forward with disturbing photos of dogs in the lab and noted that they appeared “very distraught” and appeared to be “in pain and distress.”

Unsurprisingly, the VA has been hard-pressed to provide evidence that it’s painful, taxpayer-funded dog experiments are helping veterans.  In a recent interview, the VA’s top animal testing official could not provide a single example of how ongoing heart attack experiments on puppies at the Richmond VA hospital have helped veterans. The lone 21st century example VA has provided is some VA-housed dog research related to the artificial pancreas device.

However, this was not even funded by taxpayers, so would not be impacted by Congress’s push to specifically restrict taxpayer-funding of VA dog experiments involving pain and distress. In addition, diabetes is also not a veteran-specific ailment that VA should be devoting limited research resources towards.

All of the other examples of “successes” that VA has been providing to Congress and the public are 30, 50, 60 and even nearly 100 years old, including the discovery of insulin, which VA conveniently fails to disclose happened in 1921. In the same way that we would not send our soldiers into battle with military equipment from 1921 because it is absurdly outdated, ineffective and inefficient, we should not continue spending taxpayers’ money on 100 year old research methods.

This dog research is a troubling symptom of a broader pattern of deception, waste and abuse in VA research. The agency’s cannabis research program was recently criticized by advocates for “wasting time and resources on recently published results that produced inconclusive results.” This was in part because VA failed to assist with recruitment of veterans for the study, thus frustrating its own tax-payer funded research.

In other words, despite spending money on the cannabis research, they are actively blocking it during the process, which is the very epitome of wasteful government spending.

The details of VA’s canine and cannabis research programs provide evidence that taxpayers are funding wasteful, outdated, and ineffective research programs — and that VA is misleading the public and Congress about the alarming specifics and potential payoffs.

An old Gaelic proverb reads “there is no greater fraud than promises not kept.” The VA still has a long way to go toward keeping its promise towards America’s veterans that it will use its resources effectively and efficiently to ensure their care and well-being.

Rory E. Riley-Topping has dedicated her career to ensuring accountability within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to care for our nation’s veterans, and is also married to a veteran of the U.S. Army. She is the principal at Riley-Topping Consulting and has served in a legal capacity for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, the National Veterans Legal Services Program, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Riley-Topping also advocates for numerous groups, including White Coat Waste, and organization that aims to end tax payer funding of animal testing; National Organization of Veterans Advocates (NOVA) and Atriax/Pridon, a company that bids on VA construction projects in North Carolina. You can find her on Twitter @RileyTopping.

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