Kevin Nealon Makes the Case Against Testing on Animals in Under 2 Minutes

Two minutes—that’s all the time actor Kevin Nealon needs to make the case against experimenting on animals.

The Saturday Night Live alum is known for his comedic skills, which fans can currently check out on the CBS comedy Man With a Plan and his web series, Hiking With Kevin. But the comedian knows that the world of animal experimentation is no laughing matter, so he’s joining forces with PETA once again to take aim at this extraordinarily wasteful and cruel industry.

Watch Nealon Debunk Pseudo-Science in Under Two Minutes

Trusting animal experiments is just as bogus as when doctors actually endorsed cigarettes or when they thought that pulling out all your teeth cured depression. As Nealon explains during his short video rant, nine out of 10 new drugs that work in animals fail in humans—but more than $18 billion in taxpayer money goes to support experiments on animals every year.

Nealon’s campaign launches during a time when the world is facing the spread of COVID-19, a global pandemic that apparently originated at a Chinese wet market, where vendors sell both live and dead animals for human consumption. And while the U.S. government is struggling to make and buy enough ventilators and personal protective equipment to treat patients during this deadly pandemic, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has wasted more than $36 million to terrorize brain-damaged monkeys with rubber snakes in fright experiments.

How is this an efficient and effective allocation of resources that saves lives?

“There’s been so much wasted time and so many wasted lives—the animals who died in experiments that meant nothing and the people who died waiting for a cure that wasn’t found because of bad science,” says Nealon. “Let’s pay for real research and real science—now. We can’t afford to wait.”

Watch Nealon channel his inner giraffe while reading PETA President Ingrid Newkirk‘s new book, Animalkind.

The Proof Is in the (Vegan) Pudding—We Can Make Vaccines Without Harming Animals

When it comes to a new coronavirus vaccine, NIH is finally heeding PETA’s call and bypassing the animal-testing phase, heading straight for human trials. While this won’t stop all tests on animals for the vaccine, it should help pave the way for safe, straight-to-human vaccine trials in the future.

Regardless of the lack of tests on animals, Moderna Therapeutics—the company behind the new coronavirus vaccine—reportedly says that “the vaccine has been made using a tried and tested process.” To which PETA says, all vaccines, drugs, treatments, and products should be “made using a tried and tested process”—one that doesn’t include using nonconsenting animals.

Animals Don’t Volunteer to Be Experimented On

Like humans, other primates have been observed to hold wakes, turn to friends for comfort, and even lose the will to live in response to the deaths of loved ones. Rhesus monkeys in laboratories have starved themselves rather than subjecting their friends to electrocution. But unlike humans, animals can’t consent to being experimented on. And if they could, they likely wouldn’t agree to be mutilated, poisoned, infected with painful and deadly diseases, burned, electrocuted, shot, addicted to drugs, or psychologically tortured and eventually killed.