[ad_1]
For immediate release:
17 February 2021
Contact:
Amanda Hayes 202-483-7382
Washington – In letters sent this morning to several National Institutes of Health (NIH) agencies, the NIH Management Evaluation Office and state auditors in Colorado, Missouri, and Oregon, PETA is urging officials to verify usage and recover at least $ 5,461,466 in wasted taxpayer funds that the University of Colorado (CU) -Boulder, the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), and the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) used to experiment with at least 384 animals that labs later deemed immaterial and killed in accordance with schools’ responses to COVID-19.
PETA notes that documents recently obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests confirm that CU-Boulder, UMKC and OHSU considered the animals used in taxpayer-funded experiments “unnecessary” – or described them using similar terminology. – and put them to sleep between March and 2012 June 2020, in line with school directives on COVID-19, which urged staff to cut back on experiments in laboratories. PETA also sent letters to these schools urging them to reimburse taxpayer funds that were wasted in this animal cleaning.
“If universities deemed the animals ‘unnecessary’ and killed them in response to laboratory cleansing of COVID-19, they shouldn’t have been bought, bred, trapped, or experimented with,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. PETA is urging federal and government officials to verify the use and reimbursement of taxpayer funds spent on notoriously nonessential animal experiments at CU-Boulder, UMKC and OHSU, and urges NIH to reinvest in animal-free research that improves human health.
PETA has also sent letters to dozens of institutions.– including Cornell University, University of California, San Diego and the University of Minnesota – about their euthanasia guidelines and FOIA requests for additional documentation are pending.
Based on PETA’s FOIA records of animals that were considered immaterial and then killed by these universities, CU-Boulder bred “unnecessary” animals for crude experiments that cause serious muscle injury and lethal mutations affecting neural development, UMKC bred nonessential animals. animals for experiments that cause debilitating eye injuries and strenuous work of bones and muscles, and OHSU has bred non-critical mice to induce genetic defects in brain development and expose them to stressful motor and behavioral tasks. OHSU experimenters also injected mice with liver cancer toxins and parasitized them to test a range of drugs.
PETA, whose motto is in part that “animals are not ours to experiment with” – opposes arrogance, a worldview based on human superiority. PETA letters to federal, state and university representatives are available upon request. For more information please visit PETA.org or subscribe to the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram…
[ad_2]
Source link