The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has lashed out at Anthony Fauci over the involvement of his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIH) in "cruel, misleading and wasteful" HIV experiments on monkeys.
"The macaque model for developing a vaccine for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has failed. After nearly 40 years of painful, deadly, expensive experiments — a vaccine is still not on the market," PETA's letter says, according to Fox News.
The organisation claimed that Fauci's institute has been using monkeys for experiments aimed at the development of an HIV vaccine for almost 40 years, but has failed to reach any result.
"Fauci has publicly stated why the monkey HIV experiments aren’t working—yet he fails, decade after decade, to stop them," said PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo on World AIDS Day (1 December). "He even co-led many of these experiments himself. Monkeys don’t get HIV, and Fauci needs to end experiments on them and instead fund modern, human-relevant research."
The animal rights group underlined that HIV is human-specific, and while monkeys' tissues do not replicate HIV, these animals also cannot get AIDS - which is why, according to PETA, attempts to find an HIV cure through monkey studies will not be successful.
PETA's bitter comments about Fauci have followed his institute's statement issued on World AIDS Day, in which it reiterates its commitment to finding a "safe, effective and durable HIV vaccine". However, the statement admitted that there have been "disappointing results" over the years - like the failure of the once-promising HIV cure strategy in 2018.
At that time, according to Science, Fauci addressed an experiment that had monkeys deliberately infected with HIV and sparked excitement over how the animals appeared to develop antibodies that resisted the infection. However, the cheer was transient, as the strategy did not work well with humans.
"We did not see those dramatic results at all," Fauci said at the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam then.
PETA has called on Fauci to resign repeatedly, even urging President Biden to weigh in on the issue. Monkey studies are not the only thing it cites, also criticising the White House's top infectious disease doctor for allegedly funding cruel experiments involving beagle puppies who were said to have been "fed alive" to parasites.
Fauci's NIH has denied that it funded the "beagle atrocity". The institute also has not commented on PETA's recent monkey-related grievances.