Build Back Kinder: PETA Billboard Appeals to Biden to Ban Failed Animal Experiments
For Immediate Release:
February 3, 2022
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Build Back Better may have had a tough journey, but PETA is offering President Joe Biden another path to a progressive legacy that has bipartisan support: building back kinder by ending useless animal experiments. Placed on highway DE-141 near Wilmington—where the president will be able to see it—a new sky-high message from the group asks that he “ban failed animal research now.”
The National Institutes of Health squanders nearly half its annual budget on animal experiments—$19.5 billion in 2020—even though 95% of new drugs that test safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials and 90% of basic research, most of it involving animals, fails to lead to treatment for humans. Developed by PETA scientists, the Research Modernization Deal provides a strategy for phasing out the use of animals and implementing high-tech, cutting-edge, animal-free methods that are more likely to yield results relevant to humans. Late last year, after reviewing the strategy, members of the European Parliament voted in favor of developing a timed action plan to phase out animal experiments.
“Embracing animal-free research—including organs-on-a-chip technology, sophisticated computer simulations, and three-dimensional cultures of human cells—would prevent needless suffering, advance science, and define the Biden presidency as forward-thinking,” says PETA neuroscientist Dr. Emily Trunnell. “Reliance on animal experiments is slowing progress in disease research—PETA’s proposal would move government-funded science forward.”
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
