At NIH the Rot is Systemic, PETA Says as It Pushes Biden Not to Hire Another ‘Dinosaur” Director

For Immediate Release:
October 25, 2021

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

It’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci who is currently under public attack over experiments on dogs funded by his agency, but the rot runs deep at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and it goes to the top. PETA is offering a solution, but to make sure President Joe Biden gets the message, PETA is running full-page ads—today in The Washington Post, tomorrow on Politico and in The Hill, and soon in the Washington Examiner—calling on him to appoint a forward-thinking NIH leader who will end the agency’s funding of animal tests and instead invest in state-of-the-art, animal-free research methods.

With NIH Director Francis Collins at the helm, NIH squandered nearly half its budget on animal experiments—$19.5 billion in 2020—even though 95% of new drugs that test safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials and more than 90% of basic research, most of which involves animals, fails to lead to treatments for humans. The Research Modernization Deal, developed by PETA scientists, provides a strategy for phasing out such studies—and last month, after reviewing it, members of the European Parliament voted in favor of developing an action plan to phase out animal experiments, including a timeline.

“Despite pleas from patients, animal experts, and forward-thinking scientists, past NIH leadership has not been willing to change the agency’s reliance on failing animal models,” says PETA neuroscientist Dr. Emily Trunnell. “PETA is calling on President Biden to appoint a new NIH director who is not only visionary but also willing to make the decisions necessary to put the U.S. back at the forefront of biomedical innovation.”

To keep driving the message home, PETA supporters in giant blow-up dinosaur costumes have been following the president to various events carrying signs that read, “Biden: Don’t Appoint Another NIH Dinosaur.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.