Wednesday, May 12, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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In response to the May 2 letter, “Animal research benefits people,” the most important discoveries haven’t involved animals.
Experiments on animals are mostly irrelevant to human health and divert important funding away from human-relevant research. Even the National Institutes of Health has admitted that 95% of new pharmaceuticals that test safe and effective in animals fail in human trials because they either don’t work or are dangerous.
While we continue to waste time and taxpayer money hurting and killing animals by conducting unreliable and inhumane experiments, there are plenty of more precise, humane and less time-consuming models to which we can resort. To wit, human clinical and epidemiological studies, high-speed computers programmed with human data, cadavers, simulators, “organ-on-a-chip” technology, cell-based tests and tissue models.
When we consider the billions of dollars thrown at animal research over all these years, the results should have been much more impressive. The letter writer states that “animal research helps all of us.” I suspect it primarily helps those who receive the funding and grants.
And while the writer represents an organization that “advocates for responsible and regulated research in animals,” I wonder if he is aware that on May 5, the Harvard Law School Animal Law & Policy Clinic revealed that the Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service in 2019 secretly quit doing complete annual inspections of animal research facilities.
Perhaps we can all agree that taxpayer money needs to be much more responsibly allocated for the benefit of people and animals.
