Stop Funding the National Primate Research Centers
While the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) looks to slash wasted taxpayer money from the federal budget, there’s a sizable chunk hidden in plain sight that PETA suggests could be immediately eliminated.
The seven National Primate Research Centers (NPRCs) have lapped up billions in taxpayer money just to prop up their infrastructure since their inception in the 1960s. Taxpayers are also bankrolling the horrors in these labs—including infecting monkeys with deadly pathogens, electro-ejaculating male monkeys, scaring monkeys with real snakes—and the violations, like scalding a monkey to death in a high-temperature cage washer.
The Washington NPRC, for instance, has a staggering 83.1% indirect cost rate, leaps and bounds higher than other areas of research. That’s tied-with-a-bow waste. And it can, and should, be eliminated.
These centers have blazed a trail of agony, torment, and death for hundreds of thousands of monkeys in more than 60 years of their existence, but they have not trod new ground toward promised vaccines and cures for the illnesses that plague humans. But that money keeps rolling in.
Created by Congress, the NPRCs were tasked with developing supposed primate “models” for human disease. They have failed. Today they serve only as places of immeasurable pain, misery, and death and as breeding grounds for disease. In 2013, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) finally admitted that most experiments using chimpanzees, our closest ape relatives, were unnecessary. Two years later, Harvard shut down the New England Primate Research Center.
The seven remaining centers—California NPRC at the University of California–Davis; Oregon NPRC at Oregon Health & Science University; Southwest NPRC at Texas Biomedical Research Institute; Tulane NPRC at Tulane University; Washington NPRC at the University of Washington; Wisconsin NPRC at the University of Wisconsin– Madison; and Emory NPRC at Emory University—are money pits representing some of the highest indirect costs on the NIH’s dole.
Need more reasons to defund the primate centers? Here’s three:
Unspeakable Cruelty
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued dozens of citations to the centers for violating federal regulations. Including:
- Monkeys scalded to death while trapped in cages that were run through high-temperature washers.
- University of Washington NIH-funded experimenter Fritzie Arce-McShane willfully and repeatedly violated protocol, deceived staff, and lethally irradiated a monkey. The monkey’s injuries were so severe he couldn’t be saved.
Pointlessness
Nearly anything labeled “science” at these centers gets bankrolled.
- An experimenter at Oregon’s NPRC gave male monkeys daily cannabis edibles. Every two months, he ejaculated them with an electric probe.
- Male monkeys from Wisconsin’s NPRC were used in a transgender study to model feminizing hormone therapy.
Complete Failure
The centers have failed at their most basic level for six decades, yet they continue to trod the same well-worn and failed paths, because the money keeps rolling in.
Case in point: In the 1980s, the centers began a serious push to find a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. Their approach? Use monkeys who cannot be infected with HIV (it’s called HUMAN Immunodeficiency Virus for a reason) instead, infect the monkeys with a virus that’s only similar, and then cure the monkeys of that disease. Same thing, right?
Unsurprisingly, some 40 years later there is still no vaccine for HIV, as humans continue to suffer. But that money keeps rolling in.
Shut Them Down
That these centers still exist is a broad daylight scandal. They’re cruel, outdated, and scientifically bankrupt. It is time to defund them.
Please contact your members of Congress and urge them to shut off the funding to the seven National Primate Research Centers TODAY.
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Note: PETA supports animal rights, opposes all forms of animal exploitation, and educates the public on those issues. PETA does not directly or indirectly participate or intervene in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office or any political party.