COVID-19 Prompts PETA Call For Allen Institute to Shut Down Animal Labs

One Experimenter Received Requests to ‘Cull All Lines to Minimum Maintenance,’ as Part of COVID-19 Response Plan

For Immediate Release:
April 9, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

In response to the Allen Institute’s COVID-19 contingency plan, one experimenter “received requests from [animal] colony managers to cull all lines to minimum maintenance,” which will likely lead to the killing of many animals.

PETA fired off a letter today to the institute’s president, Allan Jones, demanding to know why the facility conducts noncritical animal experiments.

The Allen Institute needs to stop all current and new animal experiments, ban the breeding and purchase of animals, and switch to superior human-relevant research methods. It also needs to tell taxpayers how many animals it deemed extraneous and killed in response to COVID-19.

“The Allen Institute’s use of intelligent animals in experiments as though they were nothing more than disposable laboratory equipment is shameful,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “The COVID-19 pandemic should be a moral and scientific reckoning for its experimenters, who conduct deadly tests on animals. If the facility can’t prove that the animals used in its experiments are needed—which we know it can’t—it shouldn’t be wasting taxpayer money on them.”

Numerous published studies have shown that animal experimentation wastes resources and lives, as more than 90% of highly promising results from basic scientific research—much of it involving animal experimentation—fail to lead to treatments for humans. (Please read under “Lack of benefit for humans” here.) And 95% of new medications that are found to be effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or click here.

PETA’s letter to the university is available here.