NIH’s Secret Deadly Virus Tests Targeted by PETA

NIH Director Francis Collins Must Resign Over Admittedly Fallible, Cruel Animal Tests

For Immediate Release:
September 13, 2021

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins is “weaponizing deadly viruses that could kill us all,” accuses PETA in an ad that appears today in The Washington Times, the first in an ad blitz calling for his resignation and for new blood to step in and end animal experiments that could doom us all.

The ad informs viewers that, according to a Washington Post investigative report, Collins and Anthony Fauci, who works under him, have been funding and approving dangerous pathogen-engineering experiments aiming to make already-deadly viruses even more contagious or virulent—in order to weaponize them—while also quietly gutting vital oversight and reducing transparency.

The ad also attacks Collins’ long, shameful record of supporting bizarre, cruel, and deadly animal experiments and allowing NIH laboratories to run roughshod over the existing bare minimum animal protection laws, resulting in extreme and needless suffering. “Collins has poured billions of taxpayer dollars into infecting dogs with diseases, frightening and inflicting brain damage on monkeys, addicting mice to cocaine, and worse—and none of it is helping humans,” PETA’s ad reads. “[He] must go.”

“Under Collins, NIH squanders nearly half of its budget each year—$19.5 billion in 2020—on animal experiments, even though 95% of drugs that appear safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials and more than 90% of basic research—most of which involves animals—fails to lead to treatments for humans,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “Collins panders to career animal experimenters at the expense of good science and needs to resign so that a forward-thinking director can take his place.”

In its strategic plan for 2016–2020, NIH demonstrated awareness of animal tests’ fallibility, stating that they often result in “much wasted time and money while patients wait for therapies”—but under Collins’ leadership, the agency has failed to right its path.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—also wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra asking him to demand Collins’ resignation.

For more information on PETA’s newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.