Glenn Beck Pulls Back the Curtain on Wasteful Animal Experiments
From executive producer Glenn Beck comes an explosive exposé of the billions in tax dollars spent every single year on cruel and ineffective animal experiments. The show, which recently aired on Beck’s TheBlaze cable TV channel, used graphic footage obtained by PETA and other animal-protection groups to illustrate for viewers exactly how recklessly and cruelly their tax money is being spent.
The National Institutes of Health’s barbaric experiments on baby monkeys, in which the babies are torn away from their mothers and intentionally terrorized, was harshly criticized by government-waste activist Anthony Bellotti. “We’re talking about experiments that have been going on 20, 30, 40 years at taxpayer expense with nothing to show for it,” he says. “We’re repeating these experiments. … And we’re doing it to endless variations on a theme. And for what? What are we getting for our money here?”
Dr. Hope Ferdowsian, an assistant professor at George Washington University’s medical school, agrees. “There are so many ethical ways to study humans … that would be so much more beneficial to the humans themselves,” she says. “This is rather ridiculous.”
Not only are experiments on animals cruel, expensive, and inefficient, they also aren’t even effective, because of vast physiological differences between species. As Bellotti points out, the Food and Drug Administration itself has admitted that 92 percent of drugs that successfully pass the animal experimentation stage ultimately fail in human trials.
“The failure rates are far too high. The expenses are far too high,” says Dr. Robert Coleman, a pharmacologist who worked for pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline for 30 years. “Common sense has got to prevail.”
But what about people who are sick with serious diseases? Surely, they’d disagree. Not according to Rep. Tom Marino, R-Pa., a three-time cancer survivor who has proposed cracking down on wasteful experiments. “The ends [do] not justify the means,” he says.
