‘Dinosaurs’ to Tail POTUS to Town Hall in Push for Progressive NIH Director

For Immediate Release:
October 20, 2021

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins is stepping down, and PETA supporters in giant blow-up dinosaur costumes will follow President Joe Biden to Thursday’s CNN town hall carrying signs that read, “Biden, Don’t Appoint Another NIH Dinosaur.” PETA is urging the president to take the country out of the scientific Stone Age by choosing a visionary replacement who will end the agency’s funding of animal tests and instead invest in state-of-the-art, animal-free research methods.

When:    Thursday, October 21, 6 p.m.

Where:    Baltimore Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St., Baltimore

With Collins at the helm, NIH squandered nearly half its budget—$19.5 billion in 2020—on animal experiments every year, 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 these studies.

“By clinging to outdated experiments on animals, NIH is getting in the way of good science,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on President Biden to move us into the 21^st century with a new NIH director who understands that new treatments, vaccines, and cures will come from modern, human-relevant research.”

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.