President Trump has at least one ally supporting his proposal to slash $5.8 billion from the National Institutes of Health next year: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
The animal-rights organization sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price Thursday arguing that the NIH, which funds medical research, could save billions of dollars if it were to cease animal testing.
According to PETA, NIH spends roughly 40 percent of its budget, or $12 billion, on studies involving animals. In arguing against such experiments, PETA has raised questions about whether they provide useful findings that contribute to better understanding of human disease.
“Continued reliance on animal experiments is undermining the search for cures for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and other diseases,” the group wrote in a press release.
Several Republicans have spoken out against Trump’s proposed budget cuts to NIH, but Price, a former Georgia representative, told lawmakers during a budget hearing last week that various inefficiencies exist within the agency.
“Our goal is to fashion a budget that focuses on the things that work, that tries to decrease the areas where there are either duplications or redundancies or waste, and whether indeed we can get a larger return for the American taxpayer,” he said.
Seizing on those remarks, PETA in its letter pointed to a column in the science journal Nature by NIH Director Francis Collins and Dr. Lawrence Tabak, NIH principal deputy director. In it, the authors write: “Preclinical research, especially work that uses animal models, seems to be the area that is currently most susceptible to reproducibility issues.”
Collins and Tabak do not specifically recommend against testing on animals in their piece, but stress that additional evidence would be necessary when considering moving forward with expensive clinical trials that have only involved animals. Collins in the past has defended the agency’s testing on animals.
NIH last summer began reviewing its policies and procedures for research on primates, following the agency’s decision to stop monkey experiments at a lab in Poolesville, Md., and end invasive research on chimpanzees.
