New ads attack Mehmet Oz for animal abuse

The top Democratic super PAC, Senate Majority PAC, is spending big on ads attacking Republican Senate hopeful Mehmet Oz for animal abuse that occurred under his watch while he served as “principal investigator” at the Columbia University Institute of Comparative Medicine.

The ads, first reported by CNN, feature footage of dogs in cages and muzzles spliced with video of Oz in a lab coat, as a narrator details the alleged abuse.

“It’s a story of unimaginable abuse,” the narrator says in one of two ads, titled “Cruel.” “Mehmet Oz ran experiments on puppies, killing over three hundred dogs. They were subjected to extreme suffering. … Puppies struggling to breathe, leaking blood, vomiting, paralysis; their screams horrifying.”

The second 30-second ad, titled “6313,” follows the journey of one dog in Oz’s lab. The puppy, labeled with the number 6313, suffered in Oz’s lab for 29 days, the ad says, until Oz “took her for the ‘last experiment.’”

Both ads end by calling Oz “unfit to be Pennsylvania’s senator.”

Oz has denied any involvement in the abuse, and campaign spokesperson Brittany Yanick said that Oz was “not in the operating room when the operations were done, he wasn’t present during the post-op treatments, no one alerted him of the problem until after the cases were finished and he does not condone the mistreatment of animals.”

The ads, which first hit the airwaves Tuesday as the Philadelphia Phillies battled the Atlanta Braves during the Major League Baseball National League Division Series, are part of the super PAC’s $33 million planned investment in state this election cycle.

“Puppy killer Mehmet Oz should be under investigation for animal abuse—not running for U.S. Senate,” Senate Majority PAC spokesperson Veronica Yoo said in a statement. “Pennsylvania families deserve a Senator who chooses compassion over unconscionable cruelty, and that’s why they’ll reject Oz and stand with John Fetterman in November.”

The abuse was first reported by local Philadelphia outlet Billy Penn. An investigation by Jezebel published earlier this month found that Oz’s team at Columbia conducted experiments on at least 1,027 live animal subjects, including 34 experiments which resulted in the deaths of at least 329 dogs.