Continuing to practice vivisection is a barbarism on a par with continuing to kill and eat animals simply because we can, because of habit, or because we like the taste. It contravenes every moral precept we claim to care about.
STEPHEN F. EISENMAN: The appearance in November 2021 of the Omicron variant of COVID 19 set off a global chase. Scientists everywhere sought to discover the nature of the mutated disease and its likely impact on the course of the pandemic… Nevertheless, despite encouraging reports from South Africa about the lesser mortality of Omicron, robust clinical evidence was still lacking by mid-December 2021…
Policy makers in the U.S. and abroad wanted to know what the likely consequence of widespread Omicron infection would be in their countries, and how long any new surge was likely to last. So, they pumped more money into biomedical research, and laboratory scientists across the globe immediately got to work doing what they do best: torturing small animals.
On December 31, 2021, the NYTimes reported that more than a dozen research groups – in the U.S., England, Germany, Japan, Syria, Hong Kong, and South Africa — had sprayed the Omicron virus into the noses of rats, hamsters and other animals in order to determine the disease’s infectiousness and impact. Many got the disease, some didn’t; many survived, some didn’t. The unsurprising conclusion was that Omicron caused “attenuated infection” (less severe disease) than Delta or previous variants. Scientists warned however, that these were only preliminary results that would need to be validated by further animal and human studies…
On the same day, the Times published a second story: “People with Omicron less likely to need hospitalization, U.K. report finds.” The authors stated that fully vaccinated people (with booster) infected with either Delta or Omicron variants were 81% less likely to go into the hospital than unvaccinated people…
So, one set of studies suggested that Omicron is a less severe disease than Delta, but because the research was only conducted on animals, it’s preliminary and unreliable. Another study, published the same day, involving more than a million patients, proves that Omicron, though more transmissible than Delta, is less dangerous to a vaccinated population. The conclusion is that the animal studies into Omicron transmission and morbidity were completely unnecessary. That raises the natural question: What have been the benefits (to humans) and the costs (to animals) of the thousands of previous animal-based Covid research projects?
The benefits to humans are uncertain because the necessity of animal experimentation in the development of vaccines and drug treatments is unclear… The animal toll has certainly been high. It’s estimated that more than 110 million mice and rats are used (and killed) in U.S. labs every year, though it is not yet known whether there has been an increase in rodent deaths from Covid research above already elevated levels. Other animals too, though in vastly smaller numbers, have been pressed into service, chiefly ferrets, pigs, and monkeys.
“An important disadvantage of animal models that develop the COVID-19 disease phenotype,” a team of European microbiologists coolly reported last year, “is that this condition is inevitably linked to pain and suffering.” In the U.S., that’s no disadvantage since rodents — comprising some 99% of all lab animals — are not covered by the Animal Welfare Act. (Neither are fish and birds also commonly used in labs.) Their pain and suffering doesn’t count…
Wild mice – those that are not genetically changed to model humans traits — are not susceptible to Covid because they lack the cellular surface enzyme that functions as the lock for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein key. That hasn’t stopped tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of them being used – pointlessly — for Covid-19 research. The search for a genetically modelled mouse that can recapitulate disease development in humans has however been intense…
Wild mice are sacrificed because scientists somehow don’t realize that they can’t get Covid. Genetically modified mice are infected with severe Covid and killed in search for treatments that fail. And both kinds of mice are sometimes killed for no reason at all. Amid the pandemic surge in May 2020, tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of mice – supposedly essential in the search for a cure – were killed all over the world because of reduced staff in laboratories. In some places, the number of mice were reduced by half, in others 10%-20%, while in still others, no tally was taken. At the University of Illinois, Chicago, a spokesperson said: “[We] did not track how many rodents were euthanized by investigators as a result of the pandemic but the number is thought to be low”.
Mice are sensitive, intelligent, and empathetic creatures. Just like humans, whales, dolphins and other mammals, birds, octopi and fish, mice and rats can re-experience the pain and fear of family members, friends, and neighbors. A recent study in the journal Science, showed that when one rat observed the alleviation of pain in a neighbor, its own pain was relieved. Spending just an hour or two getting to know a second mouse was enough for the first mouse to share its emotional state. This shouldn’t be a surprise.
A few years ago, researchers at the University of Chicago showed that empathy or “an other-oriented emotional response elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of an individual in distress” was characteristic of laboratory rats. When confronted with a trapped rat, a free rat will do everything it can to liberate its cage mate, even when offered chocolate instead, one of its favorite foods. (After liberating the caged rat, the free one shared its chocolate.)
Continuing to practice vivisection is a barbarism on a par with continuing to kill and eat animals simply because we can, because of habit, or because we like the taste. It contravenes every moral precept we claim to care about, everything we know about evolutionary biology and human kinship with other species, and what we have learned about successful laboratory science. The challenge posed by Covid-19 should not be used as an excuse to continue the practice of vivisection; it’s a reason to do things differently.
The usefulness of animal testing – a question apart from its ethics — has come under sustained criticism in recent years. Some 92% of animal trials of pharmaceuticals end in failure. The reasons are many, but three stand out: 1) the inability to control for the impact upon animals of different laboratory settings and research procedures; 2) the obvious lack of congruence between animal models and human disease; and 3) differences in genetics between test species, and even between individual animals of the same species. The consequence of these non-predictive animal experiments is investment in drug protocols that don’t work, and disinvestment in drugs that do. In both cases, human well-being is negatively impacted.
Nevertheless, the pipeline of money continues and so there is little incentive to change course. The financing comes from government grants, private donors to hospitals and universities, and most of all, exorbitant drug prices. It is in nobody’s interest – except animals and the public — to do anything that might potentially discomfit drug designers, marketers, corporate boards, university presidents, and stockholders content with the existing animal experimentation system and pharmaceutical profits. SOURCE…
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