COVID-19 Prompts PETA Call for Legacy Health System to Shut Down Animal Labs

Experimenters Told to Euthanize Animals as Part of Pandemic Response Plan

For Immediate Release:
April 17, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, Legacy Health System “had ALL of [the animals] euthanized to close the lab down & put a stop to experiments,” according to one experimenter on Twitter.

PETA fired off a letter today to the company’s CEO, Kathryn Correia, demanding to know why it conducts noncritical animal experiments. The group is also asking the public to e-mail the company via this action alert to urge it to be transparent regarding how many animals it deems nonessential and euthanizes in response to COVID-19 and to stop all current and new animal experiments.

“Legacy Health System’s use of intelligent and sensitive animals in experiments as though they were nothing more than disposable laboratory equipment is shameful,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “The COVID-19 pandemic should be a moral and scientific reckoning for the company, which conducts deadly experiments on animals it keeps inside small steel cages. If it can’t prove that the experiments are essential—and its response to the pandemic indicates that they’re not—it must not be permitted to continue squandering taxpayer money on them once the pandemic is over.”

Numerous published studies have shown that animal experimentation wastes resources and lives, as more than 90% of highly promising results from basic scientific research—much of it involving animal experimentation—fail to lead to treatments for humans. (Please read under “Lack of benefit for humans” here.) And 95% of new medications that are found to be effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or click here.

PETA’s letter to the company is available here.