Member-only story
It’s Wrong to Test Coronavirus Vaccines on Animals
Even if it saves human lives, animal testing is ethically indefensible
Today it was announced that the Trump administration has ordered that $1.8 million dollars be spent to purchase monkeys that will be used to test Coronavirus vaccines. Monkeys have already been used in tests in China, and the US has also ramped up mice breeding.
The monkeys will be supplied by Worldwide Primates, a Florida company that imports them and also has a history of framing animal rights advocates and committing mail fraud, a charge the founder admitted to and received five years of probation for. In the ’90s, that same founder, Matthew Block, spent 13 months in prison after smuggling six baby orangutans bound for Russia. The babies were packed so tightly in the crate that one was found upside down, and two were already dead when they were discovered.
It’s extremely likely this virus started, like most pandemics do, with humans treating animals as objects to be used and consumed. Now, to fix it, we’re doing more of the same. Animal testing is unlikely to cause another pandemic, but it’s nonetheless wrong. I don’t want humans to suffer either, but we can’t stop creating problems and then fixing them by continuing the same old patterns.
What’s more, animal testing isn’t even particularly effective. We pump mice and rats with diseases and treatments constantly (estimates for the number of rats and mice used in experiments in the U.S. range from 11–100 million annually), but most of the ones that prove effective ultimately fail human trials. We don’t know all the ways in which animals and humans might differ when it comes to any given illness or drug, but scientists forge ahead anyway — presumably because who cares about a bunch of mice and rats anyway?
When I’m talking about my veganism and accompanying radical stance on animals, occasionally someone will earnestly question whether I really think non-human animals are equally important as humans. When animal rights, or even a fight for basic animal welfare, is in the news, there’s always someone…
