People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) called on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to address 17 new federal animal welfare violations — adding to the 120 violations it has uncovered in the past several years.
Some of the new violations, which allegedly took place between January through May of 2022, include drugging animals to death, leaving mice dehydrated and starved, carrying out unapproved procedures, and improper tail amputations, in which mice “likely experienced unrelieved pain.” PETA listed each alleged violation in a letter dated August 15 to Dr. Nina Schor, acting deputy director for Intramural Research at the NIH, and called on her to “address what is an indelible stain on NIH’s reputation.”
Despite submitting the letter to the intramural research program, PETA received a “dismissive letter” from the extramural research program “signaling that NIH can’t be bothered to even seem to care about the problems in its laboratories,” PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna exclusively told Breitbart News on Tuesday.
Chandna added that the “chronic and serious violations of minimum animal welfare guidelines in NIH’s laboratories suggest a poisonous culture of disregard for animal welfare that infects every level of NIH’s enterprise.”
She continued:
From the employees who fail to provide food and water to animals — allowing them to die of starvation or thirst — to the elite lead experimenters who’ve somehow decided they’re above the law and can do whatever they please with animals, including performing experimental surgeries without pain relief, it’s clear that lack of compassion for the tens of thousands of vulnerable animals in NIH’s laboratories — including dogs, monkeys, and rabbits — is woven through the fabric of the agency.
The world if @NIH stopped throwing away money on useless animal experiments pic.twitter.com/xIElzQCSpz
— PETA (@peta) August 16, 2022
Chandna told Dr. Schor in the letter that the NIH’s past “feeble assurances of strengthened training, updated SOPs, enhanced ACUC oversight discussions with staff, and experimenters’ apologies specified in the case reports have been entirely insufficient to address the wholesale failures in NIH’s laboratories.”
When Breitbart News asked Chandna if the NIH has taken any actionable steps in response to the 120-plus violations, she called the above-mentioned steps “anemic measures.”
“With each violation of animal welfare guidelines — for instance, when dogs used in a septic shock experiment developed infections, when a mouse’s body erupted in flames during a surgery (this happened twice), and when a monkey was denied veterinary care and died in a cage after losing 20 percent of her bodyweight — NIH has insisted that it has implemented new SOPs, strengthened training, or increased oversight, but none of these anemic measures has stemmed the flood of violations (and the resulting pain and misery for animals) in the agency’s laboratories,” she said.
Moreover, she criticized the NIH’s “massive wastage of public funds” and called the NIH’s alleged failure to comply with minimum animal welfare guidelines “a betrayal of the U.S. public.”
“The majority of Americans do not support the use of animals in experimentation, and as evidence accumulates that using animals in experiments fails to produce treatments or cures for humans, support for the cruel and deadly enterprise continues to erode,” she said.
PETA for years has advocated for the end of animal testing and has repeatedly denounced the NIH for its heinous animal experiments. More recently, PETA has brought attention to the NIH’s effort to create transgender monkeys, as well as being involved in a $1.2 million contract to purchase beagles for “cruel experiments.”
#ArrestFauci took off on social media after it was revealed that Fauci’s division of the NIH partially funded cruel experiments on dogs. https://t.co/YKxfZpmeed
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) October 26, 2021
Chandna contended the NIH should stop animal trials altogether and promoted PETA scientists’ “Research Modernization Deal,” which she said would refocus resources on “promising non-animal, human relevant testing.”
“Presently, even when NIH acknowledges that an area of experimentation isn’t working — but is only squandering money, causing suffering to animals, and betraying human patients — the agency continues to fund such experimentation,” she said.
“For example, NIH has funded painful and deadly sepsis experiments on mice for decades. Even after its own then-director Francis Collins publicly acknowledged in 2013 the “loss of decades of research and billions of dollars” in the development of 150 drugs that successfully treated sepsis in mice but failed in humans, the agency continued to (and still continues to) direct tens of millions of taxpayer dollars each year to sepsis experiments,” she continued.
Chandna also touted the FDA Modernization Act, which was introduced by Sen. Rand Paul in October of 2021.
“Last year, the bipartisan FDA Modernization Act was introduced by Senator Rand Paul to change the FDA’s outdated rules that require deadly animal testing to allow pharmaceutical companies to use modern, human-relevant methods—such as organs-on-a-chip, three-dimensional tissue models, bioinformatics, and organoids—to test new drugs,” she said. “This would unshackle pharmaceutical companies from being forced to use slow, expensive and unreliable animal tests that were developed 70 years ago, and use faster, cheaper, and more reliable testing methods instead.”
Breitbart News reached out to the NIH and asked if it would like to comment on PETA’s allegations, if it plans to change its protocols, and if it is considering ending animal trials. A spokesperson for the NIH Office of Extramural Research said in part that the “NIH takes seriously all allegations of noncompliance with the PHS Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (PHS Policy), either self-reported by the institution or received from other sources and investigated by the NIH Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW), Division of Compliance Oversight.”
The NIH Office of Extramural Research said all incidents were “self-reported to OLAW by the NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP).
“In each case, OLAW reviewed the information presented within the context of the entire institutional program, considered the seriousness of the noncompliance and evaluated the corrective actions taken and the proposed plans to prevent recurrence,” the spokesperson wrote. “Based on OLAW’s ongoing review of the NIH IRP and their efforts to meet the requirements of their Animal Welfare Assurance agreement with OLAW, they are in compliance with the PHS Policy.”
The Office of Extramural Research added that the goal of the self-reported system is to enable improvement in the institution’s animal care and use program.”
“All animals used in NIH-funded research are protected by laws, regulations, and policies to ensure the smallest possible number of subjects and the greatest commitment to their welfare. This includes ensuring that harm and distress is minimized as much as possible,” the spokesperson added.
The NIH did not answer whether it intends to shift away from animal experimentation in the future.
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