The National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS), dedicated to advancing science without harming animals, released the following statement from Senior Manager of Policy and Advocacy Meredith Blanchard in response to the “Make America Healthy Again” strategy announced by the White House on September 9:
For more than 95 years, NAVS has pushed for getting animals out of research with not only the wellbeing of animals in mind, but the health of humans equally at the forefront. Science conducted on animals in order to study human health is flawed science, and flawed science inevitably leads to imperfect applications or stagnation in the field of human health. It is our firmly held belief that science must innovate and move past the use of animals, instead focusing on 21st century technology like organs-on-chips, artificial intelligence, and more. This will lead to more accurate applications, which means better medicine, better research, and a healthier population in the long term.
We are pleased to see the federal government continue to make the connection between smarter science and superior human health. While recent, similar announcements from the FDA, NIH, and EPA, among others, have shown a clear shift towards humane science, having core tentpoles of our movement laid out in a plan to address the health of Americans makes the connection between human-relevant methods and improved health a concrete one.
We hope that at the very least, this strategy helps reinforce the idea that getting animals out of labs has a direct, positive impact on human health and the sooner that we move away from this way of doing science, the sooner we can see improvements. Sinking billions of taxpayer dollars on animal methods that fail at a 90 percent rate is simply unsustainable and a mismanagement of priorities that prevent us from making strides towards better human health.
