PETA Statement on Moderna Vaccine Announcement

For Immediate Release:
November 16, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Washington –

Please see the following statement from PETA scientist Jeffrey Brown regarding Moderna’s announcement that clinical data show that its COVID-19 vaccine is 94.5% effective at preventing infection:

COVID-19 research is paving the way for safer, faster development of more effective vaccines. Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech didn’t wait for lengthy tests on monkeys and mice but did the majority of the animal tests at the same time that their vaccines were being tested on humans. The message for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is clear: Improve vaccine research by removing the requirement for lengthy animal trials. Decades have been wasted on misleading animal tests intended to develop vaccines to prevent AIDS, tuberculosis, Zika, and other deadly diseases, with nothing to show for it. It’s time to shift the focus from yesterday’s science and embrace the new model that Moderna and other companies have pioneered—and to take it a step further by replacing animal tests with more reliable and human-relevant animal-free ones.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.

For more information, please read 7 Things You Need to Know About Experiments on Animals and COVID-19.