PETA Thanks Jack Dorsey for $1B COVID-19 Relief—but What About Animal Tests?
The world is a tense, uncertain place right now. But as the novel coronavirus continues its assault on hospitals and normal life as we knew it, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has pledged $1 billion for global COVID-19 crisis relief.
This sounds like real, lifesaving relief—and PETA wants to make sure it’s the kind that has no animal-testing strings attached.
PETA wrote Dorsey thanking him for his generous commitment to providing humans with assistance after he revealed a mission to “disarm this pandemic.” We also urged him to assure the public that not one penny of his donation will be used to fund experiments on animals.
People need food, health care, and housing assistance. They don’t need dead, infected animals.
Animals are not tiny humans, and experiments on them have failed dismally in all areas of research. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) reports that novel drugs fail “in about 95 percent of human studies,” even though they appeared safe and effective in preclinical experiments using animals.
The use of monkeys as models of human infection in experimentation involving other coronaviruses (those that cause SARS and MERS) has failed to yield any vaccines for the viruses. It’s unlikely that the situation with the virus that causes COVID-19 will be any different—we already know it doesn’t behave the same in humans as it does in monkeys.
Monkeys in laboratories would starve themselves rather than subjecting their friends to electrocution. In nature, some monkeys lay sticks on the ground indicating to others which trail to follow. These sensitive, intelligent animals deserve our respect. They shouldn’t be killed in irrelevant experiments.
Thankfully, real scientists are already using non-animal research methods to combat COVID-19.
Scientists from PETA have prepared the Research Modernization Deal, a report that details how the use of animals has failed biomedical research, delayed treatments, and wasted significant time and money. The report offers a strategy for identifying and eliminating funding for methods that are known to fail and refocusing resources on more promising, modern methods of research.
Experimenters use countless illogical reasons (in addition to the coronavirus) to poison, shock, mutilate, and kill monkeys inside laboratories.
Right now, taxpayers are funding gruesome tests in which NIH experimenters cut into monkeys’ heads, saw off a portion of their skulls to expose the brain, and then inject toxins into them to inflict permanent brain damage. Afterward, the experimenters scare the monkeys with fake snakes and spiders.
Sounds insane, right? These tests, conducted by Elisabeth Murray, have gone on for decades. Just like testing the effects of coronaviruses on monkeys, they have no value for humans. They’re simply ways to steal grants and other funding from actual scientific research.
Want to help monkeys? Using the link below, demand that NIH end these experiments.
