Virginia Tech Tries to Cover Up Animal Deaths in Laboratories, but PETA Exposes the Receipts

Despite Misleading Claims, School Culled Animals Because of COVID-19; Group Demands Return of All Funding for ‘Non-Essential’ Experiments

For Immediate Release:
December 1, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Armed with damning internal documents, PETA sent a letter today to Virginia Tech’s (VT) president, Timothy D. Sands, calling out the university’s misleading public claim that it “did not mandate any animals to be euthanized due to COVID-19,” citing records showing that VT laboratories deemed animals expendable and killed them in response to the pandemic. Accordingly, PETA is calling on the university to reimburse any public funds used for the experiments.

“Given that Virginia Tech deemed numerous experiments and the animals used for them to be non-essential, the animals shouldn’t have been bought, bred, trapped, or experimented on in the first place,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA urges Virginia Tech to stop wasting taxpayer dollars and animals’ lives on pointless experiments and to pursue superior, animal-free research.”

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

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