Progress! Budget Axe Falls on Failed Vaccine Tests on Monkeys: PETA Statement
For Immediate Release:
June 4, 2025
Contact:
Brandi Pharris 202-483-7382
Please see the following statement from PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo regarding the National Institutes of Health’s decision to halt funding for primate-based vaccine testing, including at the Simian Vaccine Evaluation Units (SVEUs), which for decades have supplied monkeys to failed HIV and other vaccine trials:
NIH’s decision to stop wasting funds on primate-based HIV vaccine studies—which have failed for more than 40 years—is huge progress for animals and signals a much-needed shift toward research that will likely now help humans. PETA urged Anthony Fauci to do this in 2021, when NIH had nothing to show after killing thousands upon thousands of monkeys and chimpanzees in such experiments. Although countless attempts were made to infect chimpanzees with HIV, the virus completely failed to reliably produce this disease—making them a dead-end model. Monkeys can’t be infected with HIV at all. Neither species offered useful insight into preventing or treating the virus in humans but research money flowed and so the experiments continued. Monkeys share our capacity for pain, loneliness, and grief—especially when their infants are taken from them—but they do not share our immune system. Continuing to use them in HIV experiments wasn’t just unethical—it was a decades-long diversion from real progress.
In another significant shift, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, which was once led by Fauci, has told three of its Simian Vaccine Evaluation Units that it will no longer fund them to test NIH-sponsored vaccines on monkeys. This long-needed action opens the door for more progressive animal-free HIV research and PETA urges all public health agencies to stop pointless animal testing and embrace human-relevant research methods instead.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.