Urge Congress to Stop Wasting Tax Dollars on National Primate Research Centers

In their decades of operation, the remaining seven taxpayer-funded National Primate Research Centers (NPRC) have blazed a trail of agony, torment, and death for monkeys imprisoned in their laboratories. The trail they haven’t blazed? One toward marketable vaccines, treatments, or cures for the illnesses that plague humans.

Yet Congress is considering a proposal to boost their funding by 27% for fiscal year 2022—an increase of nearly $30 million. Legislators could vote on this issue any minute—that’s why we need your help immediately to urge your representatives to shoot down this disastrous proposal.

The NPRCs claim that there’s a shortage of monkeys for coronavirus research and that they need more money for their breeding programs. But there’s no shortage, because monkeys aren’t of any use to such research. Our government admits that 95% of new medications and vaccines developed in animals fail in human studies. Using animals is delaying effective treatments. Decades of experiments on monkeys at these institutions have also failed to produce the promised vaccines for HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and Zika virus.

The companies that developed the COVID-19 vaccines have publicly acknowledged that animals aren’t good models for coronavirus vaccines—and not a single monkey bred at any of the NPRCs was used to bring the vaccines to the public. Consider this: Congress has approved funding for the primate breeding centers for 60 years—yet when a vaccine was most needed to protect the public from a pandemic, these facilities failed to produce a single monkey used in that vaccine development.

Records reviewed by PETA show that the NPRCs’ breeding colonies are rife with unintended diseases and suffer from high infant mortality rates. U.S. laboratories have been importing nearly all the monkeys they use in laboratories.

Congress must not fuel the NPRCs with even more taxpayer dollars. Please take action today to urge your elected officials to reject the proposed funding increase to these wretched primate prisons.

Only U.S. citizens can take action on this alert. Others can speak out against the use of primates in experiments here.

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This action is limited to residents of the United States.

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