To the Editor regarding: “Future Vaccines Depend on Test Subjects in Short Supply: Monkeys” (news article, Feb 23, 2021):
I’ve worked with monkeys inside animal research facilities and for these highly intelligent
individuals to be compared to oil is disturbingly upsetting. Yet, they’re certainly treated like inanimate commodities in labs.
Contrary to the images in the article, most monkeys are locked in tiny metal cages with barely any room to turn around, no interaction with other monkeys, and certainly no sunlight or green grass.
This entire article reads like some kind of sales pitch for securing “monkey reserves,” yet when developing COVID-19 vaccines, many animal tests were bypassed because they don’t work, and the research industry knows it. Per the NIH, 95% of drugs shown to be safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.
Flipping a coin is more accurate than most animal experiments. We need to stop investing in
this failing field and put money toward advancing non-animal models—research based on
human biology that actually works.