You've got to be kidding me: Humanized Mice?

Terence P. Jeffrey reports at CNSNews.com,

The National Institutes of Health will not decide whether to continue its long-term multimillion-dollar contract with the University of California, San Francisco to make “humanized mice” with organs taken from aborted babies until after it has completed its ongoing audit of all HHS-funded fetal tissue acquisitions and a comprehensive review of HHS-funded fetal tissue research.

...“During the 90-day extension,” the NIH said, “the NIH Contracting Officer Representative can instruct UCSF to produce new mouse cohorts, obtain or engraft new fetal tissue, and/or start new in vitro or humanized mouse studies that are not already planned if deemed scientifically necessary.”

...A record posted on the Federal Procurement Data System says that on Dec. 4, 2018 the NIH obligated $521,082 to UCSF for the contract for a period that runs through March 5, 2009.

In October, the NIH told CNSNews.com that if it exercised all of the contract’s options through Dec. 5, 2020, it would pay UCSF a total of $13,799,501. “We have obligated $9,554,796 to date,” NIH said then. The new record posted on the FPDS indicates that with the $521,082 payment for the current 90-day extension, the NIH has now paid UCSF a total of $10,075,878 on the contract.

...The NIH estimates that it spent $103 million on research using human fetal tissue in fiscal 2018 and that it will spend $95 million in fiscal 2019.

The Labor-HHS-Education bill that the House Appropriations Committee approved last July—when the Republicans still controlled the chamber—specifically prohibited federal funding of research using tissue from aborted babies.

However, the “minibus” appropriation that married the Defense and HHS funding bills that the full Congress enacted--and President Trump signed--in September did not include that prohibition.

Whether or not the federal government continues to fund human fetal tissue research that creates a demand for tissue taken from aborted babies is now an internal policy decision in the hands of the Trump Administration.

Read more here.