A query hangs over the world of well being analysis because the Trump administration slashes authorities jobs and budgets, together with federal funding that results in the approval of recent medicine and medical therapies.
What occurs to the monkeys?
Using primates for experiments in U.S. laboratories has soared over the previous decade as scientists depend on them to check drug security and research human maladies. They’re the closest dwelling family members to people. Demand has elevated at a quicker tempo than monkeys can reproduce, resulting in longer waits and better prices for researchers.
Taxpayers have poured billions of {dollars} into breeding monkeys, importing them from overseas international locations, protecting them wholesome and transporting them to distant laboratories. South Carolina has performed a serious function. However the Trump administration has signaled that the go-go days of expensive primate analysis are in peril amid threatened federal-funding cutbacks. The cash might now not be there for the monkey enterprise the federal government helped construct.
The prospect of shuttered labs at main federal analysis facilities has ignited fears of mass euthanasia for primates that signify an enormous authorities funding — each of money and time. Seven nationwide primate facilities that breed and home hundreds of analysis monkeys are lobbying to salvage funding. A current federal lawsuit says {that a} middle in Seattle might must “cut back or remove” 800 primates if the analysis cuts stand.
“The results could be horrible for the animals. That cash goes to their repairs, their breeding, their feeding, offering them with veterinary care. If the cash disappears, you must ask your self, ‘What is going on to occur to these animals?’” stated Dr. Paul Locke, a scientist and lawyer on the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His toxicology coverage lab research alternate options to animal testing.
For years, the U.S. merely couldn’t get sufficient monkeys to feed its insatiable analysis calls for. South Carolina provided monkeys for analysis into polio vaccines relationship to 1949. The worldwide hunt for a wholesome provide spawned smuggling rings, unlawful imports and an limitless path of home opportunists searching for fast income.
Monkeys are pure gold. Within the final 5 years, the common value of an endangered long-tailed macaque, used often for analysis, has quadrupled to as a lot as $24,000 per animal.
However in recent times, scientists have begun to rethink their use of primates in experiments that usually sacrifice monkeys after painful assessments. One behemoth federal well being care system, the Veterans Administration, is below congressional orders to finish its primate utilization by subsequent 12 months. The U.S. Meals and Drug Administration, one other prime person of monkey analysis, is encouraging scientists to make use of more humane and cost-effective alternatives.
South Carolina political leaders thought of their embrace of the primate enterprise — a loud, disease-carrying, environmentally dangerous commodity that many places didn’t need — as a contribution to the higher nationwide good. The state’s monkeys aided within the seek for cures for AIDS and COVID, and helped handle bioterror threats. Billy Keyserling, a former Beaufort mayor and state legislator, put it this manner: “As a lot as individuals won’t like utilizing monkeys, it is a necessity.”
The state Division of Pure Assets holds title to Morgan Island close to Beaufort, house of the nation’s largest colony of free-ranging monkeys. As many as 4,000 primates stay on what’s colloquially referred to as Monkey Island. They’re owned by the Nationwide Institute of Allergy and Infectious Illnesses.
Staring spookily from the bushes at passing boaters, the rhesus monkeys are priceless federal property of the company headed for many years by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s a first-rate goal of the political proper. Fauci retired in 2023. When contacted by The Publish and Courier, he referred inquiries to NIAID.
The passive association has allowed the state to shift all regulatory duty for public well being and security to the federal authorities, which can decide the ”way forward for actions on Morgan Island,” stated a spokesperson for Gov. Henry McMaster.
Federal cash has poured into South Carolina for firms concerned in breeding, care and analysis. The federal government has awarded Alpha Genesis, which runs a sprawling monkey farm in Yemassee and outpost in Early Department. greater than $113 million in contracts. In 2023, it gained a contract price $26.9 million to handle monkeys on Morgan Island.
And federal cash is barely a slice of the corporate’s industrial enterprise of promoting monkeys and their blood, serum and tissues to outdoors purchasers.
Alpha Genesis attracted unwanted attention in November when 43 monkeys owned by the Nationwide Institutes of Well being bolted into the wild. Locals had been warned to keep away from contact with the animals, which might scratch or chunk when confronted. It took months to spherical them up.
The escape and a subsequent mass monkey casualty drew consideration to Alpha Genesis’s report of violations and tepid regulation by federal companies charged with imposing animal welfare protections. The agencies said months after the incidents that they’d problem no fines or penalties.
Massachusetts-based Charles River Laboratories in 2023 pulled out of a contract to supervise Morgan Island. The corporate ended its work for strategic causes, a spokesperson stated. The choice, nevertheless, got here quickly after firm officers introduced they had been cooperating in a Justice Department investigation of monkeys illegally imported from Cambodia. Charles River maintains a Microbial Options lab in Charleston that has no primates.
Alpha Genesis Inc. in Yemassee, the place 43 monkeys escaped late final 12 months.
Head depend, future funding unclear
An ever-changing roster of companies throughout the nation import, breed and promote monkeys for analysis. It’s a turbulent trade with frequent mergers and acquisitions — and a darkish previous.
The regulation of primate firms is split amongst an online of federal companies, every now going through steep staffing cuts. Regardless of the flood of required paperwork and common inspections of each operator licensed to breed or promote monkeys, nobody has a complete estimate of the entire variety of analysis monkeys within the U.S.
The one readability comes from the U.S. Division of Agriculture, which publishes an annual survey of primates held in labs and reserve. The newest number stood at 107,812.
That didn’t embody hundreds dwelling in personal sanctuaries, just like the south Texas retreat run by Born Free USA. It additionally didn’t consider retired analysis chimpanzees dwelling in Louisiana or the retired gibbons at a non-public sanctuary in Summerville.
It additionally didn’t depend monkeys operating wild within the Florida tropics.
Tallies for Alpha Genesis monkeys solely account for about 40 % of these the corporate controls. Different primates memorialized in inspection reviews usually are not counted within the annual surveys.
An Alpha Genesis facility in Early Department on Wednesday, March 19, 2025. In late 2024, 43 monkeys escaped from one other firm facility about 6 miles away in Yemassee.
President Donald Trump’s strikes have rattled the 27 divisions of the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, which spends a lot of its $47 billion funds on outdoors analysis by about 300,000 scientists. It funds greater than 60,000 proposals yearly at greater than 2,500 establishments.
South Carolina universities introduced in $225.5 million in NIH analysis funding within the 2024 fiscal 12 months.
Monkey analysis is right here to remain, even when budgets are minimize to the bone, proponents of biomedical analysis argue. An NIH research in 2018 described a primate scarcity as a “severe risk to nationwide safety” due to their important function in creating responses to emergencies like an anthrax assault or Ebola outbreak. Over the many years, monkeys had been blasted with deadly doses of radiation to develop nuclear weapons and utilized by the Pentagon to check infectious ailments and publicity dangers from lethal toxins.
“Each evaluation that has been carried out within the current years means that the nation wouldn’t have an sufficient provide (of primates) to have the ability to meet calls for that may be related to any emergency that presents itself,” stated Kenneth S. Ramos of Texas A&M, who chaired the professional research group assembled by the Nationwide Academies of Science, Engineering and Drugs.
Monkey initiatives have lengthy been focused by critics of presidency waste. Two outstanding Republican senators in 2010 mocked a federally funded research monitoring monkeys excessive on cocaine. A decade later, the watchdog group White Coat Waste took credit score for stopping a small undertaking commissioned by the VA in Charleston to check whether or not overfed monkeys developed untimely macular degeneration. The VA stated the research by a non-public vendor was by no means funded.
In current weeks, that group has joined U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace in a broader assault on what it sees as wasteful animal analysis. Mace, who hopes to finish animal testing, used a ship journey to Monkey Island in 2020 to focus consideration on Fauci’s use of federal funds for what she referred to as “grotesque science experiments.”
Justin Goodman, White Coat Waste senior vp, stated a “come to Jesus” speak is required about the way forward for monkeys within the U.S.
“If this new administration does the appropriate factor, they are going to take a tough have a look at locations like Morgan Island. Something Anthony Fauci touched goes to go below the microscope,” Goodman stated. “However on the finish of the day, I do not know what the long run appears like for the monkeys. They’ve nowhere to go.”
No monkey left behind
In Yemassee, Greg Westergaard stands prepared if funds cuts imperil monkeys at any federally funded primate facilities. He has huge undeveloped acreage within the scenic Lowcountry and a non-public income stream that may enable him to rescue monkeys put in danger by shrinking federal budgets.
Westergaard, CEO of Alpha Genesis, controls South Carolina’s primate inventory. He estimates that it consists of about 10,000 monkeys. Whereas complete monkey tallies are unclear, a Publish and Courier evaluation of USDA knowledge reveals that Alpha Genesis is among the many six largest primate managers within the nation, competing with main establishments like Charles River and the College of Louisiana at Lafayette.
“You’ll see ‘sanctuaries’ providing to soak up monkey, if another person foots the invoice,” Westergaard stated in an electronic mail. “However that’s all (expletive), as they don’t have the amenities, staffing, or experience to take action correctly. And even when they did, the prices could be astronomical, as in lots of billions of {dollars} over a interval of 30 or extra years.”
What number of monkeys would Alpha Genesis be keen to soak up?
“Doubtlessly hundreds,” he stated.
An Alpha Genesis facility in Early Department on Wednesday, March 19, 2025. In late 2024, 43 monkeys escaped from one other firm facility about 6 miles away in Yemassee.
Westergaard’s provide comes after an extended interval of unflattering international consideration for his firm, which the animal rights motion and firm whistleblowers have held out for example of regulatory negligence and animal neglect. The spectacle of analysis monkeys operating free within the woods, lured again by traps laced with fruit and peanut butter, grew to become fodder for late-night speak reveals and tabloid headlines.
However no regulatory hurdle stands in the best way if Westergaard expands his monkey inhabitants. The corporate has steadily grown for years with no native opposition, whilst its operations additional pressured native companies.
Alpha Genesis’ progress and challenges provide a uncommon look into the customarily secretive monkey trade. It’s headquartered in Yemassee, a crossroads named after the Native American tribe that when roamed the land.
Alpha Genesis ranks as the world’s largest employer, with about 350 staff, City Supervisor Matthew Garnes stated. Low-skill jobs on the farm will pay way more and require shorter commutes than service positions at Hilton Head Island resorts, a serious employment hub.
Garnes and Police Chief Gregory Alexander, who helped reply to the November monkey escape, met with Mace in Washington, D.C.
“We knew how devastating the lack of that enterprise could be, not only for the city, however for the entire area,” Garnes stated.
Creating a brand new picture
Westergaard is a survivor in an trade that has weathered worldwide scandals, Justice Division indictments and cutthroat battles with a motion that makes no secret about its need to place him out of enterprise.
He purchased Alpha Genesis in 2003 after the earlier homeowners, Laboratory Animals Breeding Companies of Virginia, had been charged in an import scandal.
LABs organized to purchase out a Jakarta vendor and imported about 1,300 crab-eating macaques by way of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. U.S. Customs officers seized some shipments and located wild-caught monkeys. These included nursing females and their infants, which ought to by no means have been shipped, court docket paperwork present.
Monkey imports are ruled by federal legal guidelines and a world treaty to stop wildlife exploitation. Fees had been introduced towards three LABs officers, together with David Taub, one other former mayor of Beaufort. The federal government dropped the felony costs towards the LABs officers after a plea settlement, and the corporate paid a $500,000 tremendous.
Westergaard, then LABs’ analysis director, moved to purchase out his former bosses. He knew lots about its South Carolina operations, together with its work on Morgan Island. LABs had established its breeding floor in 1979 after delivery in 1,400 rhesus monkeys from southern Puerto Rico because it battled a herpes B epidemic. Monkeys are carriers of herpes B, however there was little concern about bringing them to an remoted barrier island within the Saint Helena Sound.
Then Westergaard got down to rebuild the corporate’s picture. He struck a take care of the Medical College of South Carolina to let a employees neurologist conduct his analysis in Yemassee. He supplied faculty excursions and created a toy line to calm anxious monkeys. He wished to develop the farm to 4,000 monkeys — 5 occasions the Yemassee inhabitants on the time.
Alpha Genesis recorded dozens of transactions with the Fauci-led NIAID and different federal well being institutes. It additionally offered monkeys for secretive assessments within the U.S. Military Medical Analysis Institute of Infectious Illnesses in Fort Detrick, Md., made well-known within the non-fiction bestseller “The Sizzling Zone” by Richard Preston a couple of thwarted Ebola outbreak. USAMRIID, with its most safety labs, was creating defenses for deadly threats like Ebola, anthrax and ricin. Westergaard declined to debate consumer relationships.
Pharmaceutical purchasers and college researchers used the Alpha Genesis laboratory, outfitted to deal with reasonable dangers. Groups from prestigious institutes just like the Harvard Medical College flew in often. Work contained in the lab was carefully held, and staff tending to caged monkeys had been certain by strict confidentiality.
For a very long time, nobody requested onerous questions. Westergaard assured the general public that the “low-level pathogens” dealt with on the lab made its work “inconceivable, principally, to trigger any unhealthy, loopy outbreak.” And but reviews had been surfacing in scientific journals that raised questions on precisely what was taking place contained in the lab. One crew was finding out the Zika virus, which triggered an epidemic in 2016 and has been linked to beginning defects. The pathogen is taken into account “low degree,” however it’s unfold by a mosquito indigenous to South Carolina. Specialists stated this left no room for lab sloppiness.
Monkeys on the Alpha Genesis facility close to Yemassee have died below questionable circumstances and, in a dramatic case this fall, escaped in giant numbers.
However the one on-site watchdog is an inside evaluate committee, headed by the corporate’s gross sales director. Underneath federal regulation, the committee, referred to as an IACUC, needed to approve all analysis and report back to regulators any “hostile occasions.” To maintain the committee from turning into a rubber stamp, it was supposed to incorporate a number of unbiased members. Alpha Genesis, nevertheless, stored most particulars of its committee confidential, together with the identify of a group consultant. A federal appellate court docket in December dominated that College of Washington erred by redacting the members of the committee in a public information request. Westergaard stated the corporate doesn’t launch the names.
Troubles within the nationwide primate trade helped Alpha Genesis win again a multimillion-dollar federal contract. Alpha Genesis in 2023 took over administration of Monkey Island for NIAID from Charles River, which was amongst a number of firms coping with fallout from the justice division import investigation.
Quickly, Alpha Genesis confronted its personal troubles. The monkey escape and mass deaths late final 12 months opened the door for aggrieved staff to allege deeper issues and regulatory negligence.
Different former staff watched from afar with rising considerations.
Susan Howell, a former Alpha Genesis researcher who served on its evaluate committee, as soon as labored with Westergaard to calm jittery monkeys who scattered after they sensed hazard.
“Nobody needs to think about animals being chased to the purpose of exhaustion for seize, testing, tattooing, or separation. Nobody needs a vaccine examined on tiny monkeys who then endure lasting psychological hurt,” she stated in an electronic mail from Costa Rica, the place she was finding out primates within the jungle.
Nobody is watching
Kathy Strickland was inspecting a monkey struggling to offer beginning. She was virtually two years into her tenure as an Alpha Genesis veterinarian and was already demoralized. She routinely witnessed monkey accidents due to damaged cages and stated she handled unqualified employees and obtained little help.
Her crew intubated the monkey and found inside harm from a C-section the earlier 12 months, based on an account she emailed to a colleague on the time. Throughout surgical procedure, the uterine wall ruptured. Strickland euthanized the primate on the working desk.
“I’m simply feeling fed up with the shortcoming to offer the minimal sufficient care,” she stated within the electronic mail to an Alpha Genesis advisor.
Kathy Strickland, a former Alpha Genesis worker, poses for a photograph outdoors of her home Wednesday, March 19, 2025.
Strickland hoped that federal regulators would discover the poor animal care she documented. The USDA enforced the Animal Welfare Act, a regulation amended in 1985 to enhance look after laboratory animals, and it was among the many net of federal companies concerned in some features of monkey regulation. The NIH Workplace of Laboratory Animal Welfare regulates animals utilized in federally funded analysis. The Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention tracks imports. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enforces worldwide treaties that shield endangered species.
However Strickland was upset when USDA inspectors got here on web site, as they do a minimum of yearly.
“They had been perhaps within the clinic I used to be in for like 10 minutes, identical to a fast stroll by way of after which again out,” Strickland stated.
Her response to the USDA’s evaluate: “What the (expletive) was that?”
The USDA has about 120 inspectors for greater than 16,000 licensed or registered amenities, which included a minimum of 144 that maintain and use monkeys for analysis. Inspections, even at giant farms like Alpha Genesis, are normally accomplished in a day. For the reason that starting of 2024, the USDA issued 29 essential animal welfare citations at monkey amenities. Penalties usually lag behind citations, however since 2024 researchers had been fined $98,600 for primate-related violations, based on a Publish and Courier evaluation.
Inspectors documented some grotesque violations. A baboon bled to dying after it bit into its IV line on the College of Maryland-Baltimore. At Wake Forest College, employees mistakenly pumped oxygen right into a monkey’s windpipe throughout a process, inflicting respiratory failure.
However reviews at Alpha Genesis extra generally recorded no deficiencies or famous that issues had been corrected, even earlier than inspectors left.
Regardless of the price of USDA regulation — $43 million was dedicated to animal welfare in the 2025 fiscal year — there are vital gaps in understanding the U.S. monkey stock. Primate researchers don’t often share info, so there’s no coordination, based on the 2023 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. With higher monitoring, animals may be reused a number of occasions, reducing down on the variety of monkeys wanted. There aren’t any uniform insurance policies about what number of experiments or how a lot ache an animal should endure earlier than they’re retired or euthanized.
Trump’s funds cuts may decimate the seven National Primate Research Centers, which maintain about 26,000 monkeys. They had been established by Congress in the early 1960s to extend monkey stock and assist NIH-funded primate researchers. The facilities say they’ve helped discover cures and coverings for each human situation from “A to Z,” or Alzheimer’s to Zika.
Trump’s resolution to chop 15 % of the costs of “indirect research” is now briefly halted by a federal decide in Massachusetts listening to a lawsuit filed by 22 states. Each primate middle has a negotiated charge with NIH that it provides atop its direct analysis grants to cowl prices of buildings, gear and depreciation.
Contract analysis organizations like Alpha Genesis, which promote companies to authorities and personal purchasers, have extra flexibility. CROs now account for 56,000 of the nation’s monkeys. The 2023 professional panel beneficial that CROs breed extra monkeys, together with the dear long-tailed macaque.
U.S. researchers additionally depend on imported monkeys, a quantity which peaked in 2021 at 32,276 and now stands at about 17,000. China’s ban of monkey exports throughout COVID led to a worldwide shift in monkey suppliers. Imports from Southeast Asia ballooned.
Trump has promised huge federal deregulation. It’s unclear how that may affect companies concerned with primates.
Throughout Trump’s first time period, USDA regulation shifted dramatically, stated V. Wensley Koch, a former company official who’s now an animal advisor.
“Up till he grew to become president, the inspectors thought of the animals to be our clients. Underneath Trump, the licensees had been the shoppers, and also you simply did not do enforcement if you happen to discovered one thing unhealthy. You simply let it keep unhealthy since you did not need to make the licensee upset,” she stated.
Underneath President Joe Biden, some former inspectors say, leaders of the animal inspection division had various views on how powerful inspectors ought to be and whether or not they need to give advance discover of web site visits.
At Alpha Genesis, the November escape and separate monkey deaths led to little greater than slaps on the wrist. The corporate has been fined as soon as by the USDA, for $12,500, within the years since Westergaard took over.
Kathy Strickland misplaced her job at Alpha Genesis in 2023 after a dispute with a supervisor. She left with haunting reminiscences of mangled animals and what she described as avoidable deaths. She began seeing a therapist to attempt to transfer on.
Alpha Genesis served her with a cease-and-desist order. It accused her of leaking delicate info. Westergaard stated he couldn’t remark.
“I do want Dr. Strickland properly in her future pursuits,” he wrote in an electronic mail to The Publish and Courier.
Strickland now works to attempt to mend animals at a veterinary clinic close to her house. She hopes to in the future shed the reminiscence of an over-sedated monkey stuffed right into a delivery crate or the wounded monkey struggling to flee a wire fence.
She stated she nonetheless hopes for accountability after her transient expertise within the monkey world.
