PETA Statement: Why Human Antibodies Are Superior to Chicken Antibodies for Fighting the Novel Coronavirus

For Immediate Release:
November 13, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA regarding the use of chicken antibodies to fight the novel coronavirus:

Snorting chicken antibodies to ward off COVID-19 infections may sound like a joke, but it’s actually just bad science.

For scientific and ethical reasons, an end to using animals to produce antibodies was recommended by the European Union Reference Laboratory for Alternatives to Animal Testing, a government organization that plays a critical role in determining the scientific acceptance and regulatory use of non-animal testing methods within the EU as well as globally.

Non-animal antibodies can be produced faster than chicken antibodies, and they overcome numerous scientific issues associated with antibodies derived from chickens, llamas, horses, camels, rabbits, mice, or other animals. In fact, animal-derived antibodies are one of the main drivers of the reproducibility crisis in scientific research.

YUMAB, a biotechnology company in Germany, announced in March that it had generated and characterized the first human antibodies to fight the novel coronavirus, and it has since confirmed therapeutic effects by using a patient-derived strain of SARS-CoV-2.

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.