COVID-19 Prompts PETA Call for University of Virginia to Shut Down Animal Labs

School Warns Laboratories That ‘Strains That Can Be Replaced … Will Be Euthanized’ as Part of COVID-19 Response Plan

For Immediate Release:
March 31, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, the University of Virginia (UVA) has told experimenters to label the cages of animals who are “critical to maintain” and that “[s]trains that can be replaced … will be euthanized,” which will likely lead to the killing of hundreds or more animals.

PETA fired off a letter today to the university’s president, James E. Ryan, demanding to know why the school conducts noncritical animal experiments.

PETA contends that UVA needs to stop all current and new animal experiments, ban the breeding and purchase of animals, and switch to superior human-relevant research methods. The school also needs to tell taxpayers how many animals it deemed extraneous and killed in response to the coronavirus, PETA says.

“The University of Virginia’s use of intelligent 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 school, which conducts deadly experiments on animals. If the university can’t prove that the animals used in its experiments are needed—which we know it can’t—it shouldn’t be wasting taxpayer money on them.”

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 university is available here.