PETA ‘Dinosaurs’ Tail Joe Biden  at COP26 in Push for End to Animal Experiments

PETA ‘Dinosaurs’ Tail Joe Biden  at COP26 in Push for End to Animal Experiments

Glasgow – As US President Joe Biden arrived at COP26 in Glasgow, PETA supporters in giant blow-up dinosaur costumes followed him, carrying signs that read, “Biden: Don’t Appoint Another NIH Dinosaur.” The action follows the resignation of Francis Collins, the director of the US public health research agency the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – the largest funder of research in the world. After recent revelations of horrifying animal experiments conducted by NIH, PETA is urging the president to take the US out of the scientific Stone Age by choosing a visionary replacement who will end the agency’s funding of animal tests and instead invest in state-of-the-art, animal-free research methods.

Photos from the action are available here.

“It’s time to stop clinging to archaic and unreliable experiments on animals,” says PETA Science Policy Manager Dr Julia Baines. “PETA is calling on President Biden to appoint a new NIH director who understands that new treatments, vaccines, and cures will come from modern, human-relevant research, which we outline in our Research Modernisation Deal.”

With Collins at the helm, NIH squandered nearly half its budget – $19.5 billion in 2020 – on animal experiments every year, including by frightening monkeys,  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 Modernisation Deal, developed by scientists from international PETA entities, provides a strategy for phasing out these studies.

PETA UK – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Contact:

Sascha Camilli +44 (0) 20 7923 6244; [email protected]

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