Animal rights nonprofit group PETA is praising the Trump administration for its work to end animal testing within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), thanking them for “helping spare tens of thousands of animals each year.”
The FDA announced Thursday it is phasing out its animal testing requirement for antibody therapies and other drugs in favor of “more effective, human-relevant methods.”
“The FDA’s animal testing requirement will be reduced, refined, or potentially replaced using a range of approaches, including AI-based computational models of toxicity and cell lines and organoid toxicity testing in a laboratory setting (so-called New Approach Methodologies or NAMs data),” the administration stated.
FDA Commissioner Martin A. Makary said drug manufacturers have performed “additional animal testing of drugs” for which they already have had human data “for too long.”
“By leveraging AI-based computational modeling, human organ model-based lab testing, and real-world human data, we can get safer treatments to patients faster and more reliably, while also reducing R&D costs and drug prices,” Makary, part of President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services (HHS) Sec. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” team, added. “It is a win-win for public health and ethics.”
The EPA made a similar announcement on the same day, with a spokesperson for Administrator Lee Zeldin telling the Washington Times that the agency would reinstate a policy from the first Trump administration to phase out animal testing.
“Under President Trump’s first term, EPA signed a directive to prioritize efforts to reduce animal testing and committed to reducing testing on mammals by 30% by 2025 and to eliminate it completely by 2035,” the spokesperson said. “The Biden administration halted progress on these efforts by delaying compliance deadlines. Administrator Zeldin is wholly committed to getting the agency back on track to eliminating animal testing.”
PETA, which has blasted health officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci for past animal testing, released a positive statement in response to the Trump administration’s recent policy directives.
“PETA applauds the FDA’s decision to stop harming animals and adopt human-relevant testing strategies for evaluating antibody therapies,” PETA senior vice president Kathy Guillermo said.
“It’s a significant step towards meeting the agency’s commitment to replace the use of animals – which PETA has worked hard to promote. All animal use, including failed vaccine and other testing on monkeys at the federally-funded primate centers, must end, and we are calling on the FDA to further embrace 21st-century science,” the statement continued.
The animal rights organization further thanked the administration on X after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared a Fox News article on the topic:
“The White House Press Secretary is highlighting this milestone! PETA thanks the Trump administration for modernizing the FDA and helping spare tens of thousands of animals each year from being killed in expensive and archaic laboratory tests,” the group wrote.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, D.C. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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