PETA Statement: FDA Approval of Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine

For Immediate Release:
December 18, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA regarding the emergency use authorization of Moderna’s vaccine against COVID-19:

Drug companies are now openly stating what PETA has known for decades—that tests on animals are unreliable hurdles that only slow down the discovery of effective drugs. The approval of the Moderna vaccine proves that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agrees: Animal tests aren’t needed to develop safe and effective drugs. Had the FDA listened sooner, we might be closer to vaccines for HIV, Zika and others, and could have saved millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of animal lives. It’s tragic that it took a devastating pandemic to get here, but it’s not too late to change the future of human health. The FDA should replace its lengthy, animal-intensive drug-development process with one that emphasizes human-relevant science.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please see 7 Things You Need to Know About Experiments on Animals and COVID-19.