Sunshine Week: After 43 monkeys escaped, we began investigating – and found a history of problems

This is the fourth column in a series commemorating Sunshine Week.

The breaking story captured immediate attention: 43 rhesus monkeys had escaped from a massive breeding and research center in Yemassee.

As we quickly covered the unfolding drama last November, reporters Marilyn Thompson and Mitchell Black began to investigate what happened and tell the deeper backstory of the primate center, Alpha Genesis.

Marilyn and Mitchell produced a series of stories over the next several months that collectively exposed a history of problems and questions about the operation. The reporters revealed that the escaped monkeys, worth at least $215,000, belonged to the federal government and reflected a rapid expansion of U.S. monkey production for scientific research.

The watchdog work described how many of the monkeys were destined for experiments supported by the National Institutes of Health, a major Alpha Genesis funder. NIH has provided more than $100 million to the company since 2005. Research involving monkeys is aimed at some of our largest public health challenges, but at times it comes at the cost of pain and premature deaths for the primates.

Marilyn and Mitchell obtained emails and other documents chronicling concerns raised by Alpha Genesis staff veterinarians and caretakers about animal care and escapes, and what the insiders described as unqualified staff and substandard practices. The reporters exposed a mass monkey death event at the facility over Thanksgiving, and broke news that researchers at Alpha Genesis had injected primates with potentially dangerous Zika virus for study in the Lowcountry.

The company’s CEO had told us in interviews that Alpha Genesis researchers worked only with “low-level pathogens” that are “impossible, basically, to cause any bad, crazy outbreak.”

I asked Mitchell and Marilyn to describe the reporting and how they relied on public records to support much of that work. This is what they had to say:

How did the reporting begin?

We responded to the breaking news on Nov. 6 that 43 young rhesus monkeys had escaped from the Alpha Genesis breeding farm in Yemassee. The company alerted local police and a hunt began to try to recover the animals.

The public was assured there was no danger, but was warned not to touch the monkeys if they wandered onto private property. The escaped monkeys belonged to the federal government and were destined for laboratory research.

The public knew little about this monkey farm sprawling across Beaufort and Hampton counties. We set out to find out more about this secretive operation.

What obstacles did you encounter?

With rare exceptions, federal agencies are excruciatingly slow in responding to FOIA requests. This has been our experience with this story. Agencies often seem to use FOIA to stall publication of stories that may reflect negatively on their performance. It can literally take years to get responses to federal FOIAS. It is a cat-and-mouse game that does not serve the public.

Animal rights groups have developed FOIA strategies that give them a jump on releases of routine inspection reports and other documents generated by “adverse events” like escapes or deaths at animal facilities. They usually get them before the news media. We verified any documents they provided with the agencies before using them.

What records did you pursue?

We pursued records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, the town of Yemassee, county and federal courts.

The state was more responsive than the federal government but still insisted on going through a time-intensive FOIA process to retrieve documents a former director told us to review. Documents from the state revealed the complicated arrangement between DNR, the NIH and Alpha Genesis over Morgan Island management. Court documents revealed how the previous monkey farm owner, LABS of Virginia, broke federal law over illegal importation of primates from Indonesia.

What did the records reveal?

A lax, multi-layered regulatory system that relies on companies to “self-report” violations of federal animal protection laws. A secretive and, to critics, an ethically questionable internal system for approving and monitoring scientific experiments. Violations of animal protection laws that rarely resulted in fines. A criminal monkey importation scheme by the previous monkey farm owner, LABS of Virginia. Massive incentives doled out by local public officials to lure a company seeking to hold 30,000 monkeys in rural Georgia.

Would the story have come to light without pressing for open government or records?

To be sure, the monkey escape would have been covered. It caught attention — monkeys running wild through a small southern town while befuddled caretakers and local police figured out how to recapture them. But for us, it offered a peek inside a highly regulated and secretive local employer with big federal contracts.

Lapses in animal care at research facilities can have significant consequences for public health and safety. The world of animal regulation was new to us and proved to be multi-layered and highly ineffective.

The deeper story could not be done without public records. After the monkey escape, three federal agencies were notified.

These same agencies had troves of records detailing site inspections and communications with company officials about problems. Some records were easily gettable through public data sets; others required persistent effort and still have not surfaced. A simple request to a USDA press officer to try to confirm the veracity of a whistleblower’s claim took weeks of waiting while the agency processed our formal FOIA request.