For Immediate Release:
October 20, 2021
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Baltimore â National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins is stepping down, and PETA supporters in giant blow-up dinosaur costumes will follow President Joe Biden to Thursdayâs CNN town hall carrying signs that read, âBiden, Donât Appoint Another NIH Dinosaur.â PETA is urging the president to take the country out of the scientific Stone Age by choosing a visionary replacement who will end the agencyâs funding of animal tests and instead invest in state-of-the-art, animal-free research methods.
When: Thursday, October 21, 6 p.m.
Where: Baltimore Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St., Baltimore
With Collins at the helm, NIH squandered nearly half its budgetâ$19.5 billion in 2020âon animal experiments every year, even though 95% of new drugs that test 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. The Research Modernization Deal, developed by PETA scientists, provides a strategy for phasing out these studies.
âBy clinging to outdated experiments on animals, NIH is getting in the way of good science,â says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. âPETA is calling on President Biden to move us into the 21st century with a new NIH director who understands that new treatments, vaccines, and cures will come from modern, human-relevant research.â
PETAâwhose motto reads, in part, that âanimals are not ours to experiment onââopposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.
For more information on PETAâs newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Source: Peta.org