The taxpayer watchdog organization White Coat Waste Project has filed a lawsuit against the DC Metro for rejecting ads exposing cruel and wasteful taxpayer-funded animal experiments.
In April, White Coat Waste contacted the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to run an ad on trains featuring art related to testing conducted by the National Institutes of Health.
The art was focused on WCW’s investigations of the NIH’s $2 million “Coke Hounds” experiment on puppies and a $1.5 million “hamster fight club” funded by the NIH and National Science Foundation.
The organization also proposed "a simple ad that just includes our name, logo, and tagline."
In 2021 and 2022, DC Metro also rejected WCW ads exposing Dr. Anthony Fauci’s funding of biting fly experiments on beagles and gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan animal lab.
DC Metro denied all of the ads, which WCW says violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments.
"Our suit aims to overturn DC Metro’s illegal ad censorship policies permanently and seeks injunctions to compel the agency to run WCW’s ads and stop it from enforcing its unconstitutional ad policies while the lawsuit is underway," WCW said in a press release.
The organization has previously taken other government-run transit agencies to court for refusing to run their ads — and they have won.
In a statement provided to Timcast News, Megan Andersen, the Vice President of White Coat Waste Project, said that the ad denial is "blatantly violating the Constitution."
"Taxpayers in the nation’s capital have a right to know that their hard-earned money is being wasted by white coats on stupid, cruel, and dangerous animal experiments uncovered by WCW including injecting puppies with cocaine, forcing hamsters to fight in videotaped cage matches, infesting beagles with biting flies and supercharging bat coronaviruses in Wuhan," Andersen said.
"We’re suing the DC Metro because it's blatantly violating the Constitution by blocking our ads about how $20 billion of taxpayers’ money is being squandered annually to torture animals in outdated experiments in the US and overseas. We’ve taken other public transit agencies to court and won over their refusal to run our ads exposing taxpayer-funded animal experiments that entail giving puppies heart attacks, forcing kittens to eat cat meat from Chinese wet markets, and hooking monkeys on heroin overseas. The message we’re trying to get out is simple: Stop the money. Stop the madness!"
