CDC Plan to End Primate Testing Signals Major Change

Last week, something extraordinary happened within the bowels of a key life sciences agency of the federal government.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has directed its scientists to end all invasive monkey testing and research. The program, built over decades and involving hundreds of macaques used for infectious-disease and HIV studies, is being shut down.

This change in policy holds the potential for a seismic shift in how our nation approaches drug testing, infectious disease work, and biomedical research for the purpose of advancing personal and public health outcomes.

It is perhaps a bigger development than the 2015 announcement by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to end in short order the use of highly intelligent and cognitively complex chimpanzees in invasive experiments.

Decades of HIV research using primates failed to produce a useful vaccine. These protracted failures became emblematic of the inherent deficiencies in animal testing.

Phasing down the use of a larger set of primates in drug testing and biomedical research should not, however, come as any surprise to people tracking the long-running debate on this subject. This development grows from our work to enact the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, a 2022 law that eliminated an 84-year-old animal-testing mandate for drug screening.

Led by Sens. Rand Paul, M.D. (R-Ky.), and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), that legislation enjoyed such broad and deep support that even in an era of bitter congressional gridlock. It passed the U.S. Senate unanimously less than one year after being introduced in that chamber for the first time. Our legislative triumph then showed that lawmakers of every political stripe recognize that the animal testing paradigm has failed and the whole system needs a revamp.

The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 set the stage for bold action by the new leaders at the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. Because of the 2022 law, they were no longer bound by a backward, unscientific policy that required the use of animals in all preclinical drug development work.

With their hands untied, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya were free to draft plans for reducing their agencies’ reliance on animal studies and expand the use of organ-on-chip models, human tissue platforms, computational toxicology, and AI-driven biomedical tools. In fact, announcing a Roadmap to Reduce Animal Testing in Preclinical Safety Studies was Dr. Makary’s first public act after taking the reins at the FDA.

Life-Sciences and Public Health Agencies Must Exhibit Consistency

The CDC’s latest action is one more major breakthrough for modern science and ethics. It is a recognition that animals, including primates, matter. It is an acknowledgement that non-human primates are poor predictors of the human reaction to drugs and disease. It is a practical calculation that acquiring and keeping primates is mightily expensive (it costs approximately $50,000 to acquire a single animal from the wild or from a breeding facility) and that we can spend finite research dollars more effectively and drive better outcomes for patients in need of treatments and cures.

Given all of that, this CDC policy is one practical manifestation of what Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy have been relentlessly pressing the government to advance as national policy. And on this front, the new leaders at our public health agencies — Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy, NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary — have been making the case for action like this.

And now they are delivering on that promise.

We are thrilled that they are applying these sound ideas in morally consequential ways, with the goal of delivering more palliatives and cures for patients in need and less misery and cruelty to animals.

No matter what you may think of the Trump Administration on any other matter, they are getting it right on animal testing. Just as it was time to end the use of chimpanzees in invasive experiments, it is now time to shed the use of tens of thousands of primates, beagles, and other animals in expensive, outdated, and unreliable tests.

In May, we formally urged NIH to take this next step by beginning an orderly wind-down of the National Primate Research Centers, which consume enormous sums of taxpayer dollars yet consistently fail to produce results that translate to human biology. It will take fortitude to execute this transition, but it’s an action plan grounded on reason, proper resource allocation, and sound science.

Changing the National Conversation

The CDC’s decision underscores what we have always known, and what top scientists have been saying for years.

The NIH, however, still maintains the largest primate footprint in the federal system — including tens of thousands of animals at the National Primate Research Centers (NPRCs). These facilities have long histories of animal welfare violations, preventable deaths, and scientific stagnation. The FDA also continues to rely on primate models for certain toxicology and infectious disease studies.

If eliminating the use of primates is the right policy at the CDC, then it’s the right policy for NIH and FDA as well. All federal life sciences and public health agencies should be consistent in their approach when it comes to the use of primates. They should speak with one voice. No need to hold onto this misuse of monkeys when we have evidence of failure and a squandering of resources for decades.

We are already working with senior members of Congress on the House Energy and Commerce Committee to urge the NIH and FDA to follow CDC’s lead. We are also pressing for a responsible federal retirement plan for the primates currently in government custody — including those at CDC, FDA, and the NPRCs.

This moment comes, as noted earlier, because of years of policy work and scientific examination and careful review of troves of data and scientific study. The conclusion is inescapable if you look at the scientific takeaways: primate research has been enormously costly, ethically fraught, and scientifically unproductive. It diverts resources away from modern technologies that are faster, more accurate, and better suited for understanding human health, improving the quality of life, and preventing diseases.

And we are hardly alone in this conclusion. As early as 2011, Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the NIH, observed that “[w]ith earlier and more rigorous target validation in human tissues, it may be justifiable to skip the animal model assessment of efficacy altogether.” In 2013, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, also a former director of the NIH, noted that “researchers have over relied on animal data” and “[w]e need to refocus and adapt new methodologies for use in humans to understand disease biology in humans.”

The CDC announcement comes after years of persistent focus on this problem, including investigation, dialogue, and public policy advocacy — made possible because of supporters like you. For too long, there was stasis. Today, however, it’s a moment of punctuated change.

But the animal-research industrial complex is as powerful as it is politically connected. There will be caterwauling and self-interest masquerading as science.

The progress we are achieving will be sure to rattle the people involved in primate capture and their harrowing transport to research facilities across the world. It will also unsettle many hard-hearted men in lab coats who do not think twice about the pain and suffering they inflict on primates. Entrenched interests like these will wave their arms and holler, digging in their heels as the landscape shifts around them.

We’ll need you standing with us. We must parry their attacks and keep pushing until all federal health and regulatory agencies understand that it’s time to move beyond the painful era of trapping primates in this failed system and doing terrible things to them.