What Will Happen to CDC Monkeys? PETA Statement

For Immediate Release:
November 25, 2025

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA Senior Science Advisor on Primate Experimentation Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel regarding the fate of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) monkeys following news that the agency will phase out all its experiments on monkeys:

People need to do the math and look who’s raising a false alarm: The monkeys at the CDC may be euthanized if no sanctuary can be found, but it will stop the cycle of killing that follows a lifetime of suffering with chronic infection, invasive procedures, confinement, and a bleak death only to have all that repeated for the next batch of monkeys and the next and the next. Pretending that prolonging these experiments “saves” the monkeys will perpetuate the killing cycle that has gone on for decades. The CDC will try to place what monkeys they can in a sanctuary, and closing the laboratories will stop the endless killing and spare thousands upon thousands of monkeys who otherwise would be killed there until the end of time.

The monkey experimenters who are crying crocodile tears for the fate of the monkeys at the CDC are the same University of Washington (UW) primate-center insiders who sold endangered pig-tailed macaques to the CDC for years. Their panic is about losing revenue and losing their careers propped up by that pipeline—not about the animals’ welfare. UW’s record speaks for itself: thousands of monkeys are killed on purpose, while others are left to starve, dehydrate, receive the wrong medication, or be infected with the wrong influenza strain for two years running—failures overseen by an in-house review committee that PETA recently reported to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for operating in a way that gutted the oversight it was legally required to provide.

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.