New NIH Strategy Statement Placates Animal Experimenters, Betrays Science: PETA Statement

For Immediate Release:
August 18, 2025

Contact:
Brandi Pharris 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA Senior Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Kathy Guillermo regarding the new strategy statement from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which offers a watered-down plan for modernizing research, doesn’t acknowledge the failure of experiments on animals, and ignores requests from Congress to end funding for animal studies outside the U.S.:

NIH Director Dr. Bhattacharya needs to say, “Get behind me, Satan” as the forces of evil try to lure him away from his promises of real change, and PETA urges him to remember that at the highest levels of the Trump administration, there are well-placed people rooting for NIH to break with career animal experimenters. For decades, the corrupt NIH old guard that argues for the status quo has bled the public coffers dry while bleeding animals to death and delivered only empty promises. Dramatic change is essential, as we’ve seen how “enhancing oversight” is a laugh-into-your-sleeve exercise, and “considering non-animal methods” is a check box as U.S. dollars continue to pour into foreign animal laboratories and down the tubes, paying experimenters to continue to stick electrodes into monkeys’ brains and give dogs heart attacks. Promising real change but not delivering spells failure for NIH and death for animals and continues the old Dr. Anthony Fauci mindset.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.