A “rogue” staff member at the Department of Health and Human Services changed the automated phone greeting on one of the agency’s numbers to imitate a pizza shop message after an influx of protest callers flooded its lines.
White Coat Waste Project, a MAGA-friendly group advocating against tax dollars being used for animal testing, recently rallied its supporters to call the DHHS and demand that it “cut funding for cat testing” at a National Institutes of Health-funded lab at the University of Missouri, according to Mediaite.
The social media post encouraging the phone campaign specifically named DHHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and included a pair of phone numbers to call.
“RFK Jr holds the ultimate power to cut the funding and save lives,” the post reads. “It’s time for MAHA (and all of us) to speak up!”
In a follow-up post, WCWP described calling the agency and getting a phone response that said: “Thank you for calling Domino’s Pizza.”
“Trump’s HHS just laughed in the faces of MAHA supporters who want to shut down Fauci’s beagle and kitten torture experiments,” the group wrote before describing the phone message.
It went on, saying the Domino’s Pizza greeting was “the message that taxpayers got when they flooded HHS phone lines yesterday to demand that HHS shut down Fauci’s cat and dog labs.”
After playing the message, the line then sent callers to voicemail.
WCWP senior vice president Justin Goodman said that the DHHS was initially answering calls with a human but initiated the automated system after the influx of protest calls, according to Politico Pulse.
“Torturing puppies with our tax dollars isn’t funny, but people at HHS apparently think it is,” Goodman said during a hearing for the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship on Wednesday.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the DHHS, told Politico that the Domino’s voicemail was the result of “an unauthorized action by a rogue employee and not representative of HHS.”
He confirmed that the phone number no longer plays the Domino’s Pizza message. It is unclear if the staffer is still employed with the DHHS.
The Independent has requested comment from the agency.
In another video posted to its social media, WCWP played the pizza message for Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican, who said the prank on protesters was “not okay.”
“Actually, it makes my stomach turn,” she said.
The DHHS under Kennedy has been receptive to ending animal testing in research labs. In December, he said the Trump administration is “trying to put an end” to primate testing.
“Across the Trump Administration, there is a shift to prioritize animal welfare,” a health department spokesperson told CBS News in a statement last year. “At HHS, that includes moves to reduce unnecessary animal testing requirements and prioritizing human-based research.”
While it’s likely that most Americans would prefer that no animals are subjected to experiments, researchers who work in animal testing say the problem is that, at least for now, there are no viable alternatives to the practice.
Deborah Fuller, the director of the NIH-funded Washington National Primate Research Center, told CBS News that primate testing is essential for developing the medicines and therapeutics that save human lives.
“The majority of the biomedical interventions that we have today went through a non-human primate at some point,” she said. “Shutting down a non-human primate research program, you’re actually shooting yourself in the foot.”
