Funding for Failed HIV Vaccine Tests on Monkeys Slashed after PETA Pressure
Another major government health agency has agreed with PETA and slashed funding from cruel experiments on monkeys that have failed to help human patients for more than 40 years.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an institute under the National Institutes of Health formerly headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, has notified several facilities that provide and test on monkeys for vaccine experiments, including the failed HIV vaccine, that NIAID has ended their contracts.
The move to cut off the spigot of federal funding to the failed Simian Vaccine Evaluation Units, coupled with other funding cuts, marks a crippling blow to the decades-long use of monkeys in HIV vaccine research. While not all monkey-based HIV experiments have stopped (yet), this effectively guts one of the largest and most entrenched programs funneling primates into these deadly studies. It comes after PETA blasted NIAID in 2021 for continuing to use monkeys to test a vaccine for HIV—a virus monkeys cannot be infected with—even though it has produced no help for human patients and only created piles of monkey carcasses.
Two things happened in 1985: Microsoft introduced its Windows operating system and NIAID began killing monkeys to find a cure for HIV. One was a success, the other killed a lot monkeys. And there’s still no HIV vaccine.
PETA has repeatedly pointed out that killing monkeys for HIV research is akin to testing squares for roundness. HIV (HUMAN Immuno-Deficiency Virus) is, by definition, human-specific. Monkeys cannot be infected with HIV, nor can they develop AIDS, the resulting syndrome responsible for so many human deaths.
The failed monkey model for HIV research has nonetheless absorbed billions of federal dollars like a dry sponge but produced only fear, torment, and death for countless monkeys, stymied the development of more advanced, human-relevant models and coldly left human patients waiting for promised treatments that have never come.
It is yet unclear what effect NIAID’s move will have on the seven National Primate Research Centers where much of the experimentation on monkeys is centered, including HIV vaccine development. But it does not bolster their tenuous grip on continued animal experimentation as the light of a new day dawns on biomedical research—one in which experiments on animals are not the go-to method of scientific inquiry.
NIAID’s announcement is the latest in a string of recent PETA victories, including a shift in National Institutes of Health funding away from animal experimentation, the end to cruel sepsis experiments on beagles, and the cancellation of federal funding for Harvard University experimenter Margaret Livingstone’s gruesome sensory deprivation experiments on baby monkeys.
What You Can Do
While this is great progress, the battle is still not over. Please TAKE ACTION to urge a complete ban on cruel HIV experiments on monkeys.
