The fur flies as Tinseltown's favorite causes lock horns over animal research.
Tensions between animal-rights activists and AIDS advocates escalated last October when a radical group calling itself The Justice Department mailed 87 razor-blade-rigged letters to primate researchers around the country. The letters, one of the most organized animal-rights campaigns to date, warned that scientists who didn't release primate captives would be "subjected to violence which is uncomparable [sic] to booby-trapped letters." This assault came on the heels of spring break-ins organized by the Animal Liberation Front at labs at the University of Minnesota and the University of California at San Francisco. None of these actions was directed at HIV research in particular, but together they unnerved AIDS activists lobbying for research into new meds to fight the epidemic. Every lifesaving antiretroviral drug, from AZT to last fall's Agenerase, was tested on animals. Critical discoveries in immunology have also been made through animal research. Every compound now in the pipeline, including vaccines, will be tested on animals before it reaches a single human body.
That's why ACT UP/Los Angeles protested a fundraiser last September for Hollywood's favorite antifur brigade, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) -- to the dismay of many peltless, red-ribbon-sporting attendees.
PETA is against all biomedical experimentation involving animals -- even research into life-threatening illnesses, regardless of what protections are in place. In 1989, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk famously remarked that even if animal studies led to a cure for AIDS, "We'd be against it." When contacted by POZ, she was unrepentant, saying, "If we could get a cure from animals for my father's heart condition, it wouldn't give me any comfort. Why don't we respect animals as victims, too?" PETA spokesperson Dan Matthews, who is gay, addressed gay community concerns in USA Today in 1996 by saying, "Don't get diseases in the first place, schmo." He recently explained to POZ that he was referring to an overall approach to stopping the AIDS epidemic, "which should include prevention."
PETA may have learned how to spin some of its PR gaffes, but many AIDS advocates see the group as extremist and a threat to already-diminishing donations for AIDS research. In 1995, after a long fight by AIDS advocates, Jeff Getty of ACT UP/Golden Gate received a baboon bone-marrow transplant, a risky experimental procedure to try to save his failing immune system, and then suffered a campaign of hate mail, hate phone calls and death threats that followed him from the hospital through his recuperation. "I had an animal-rights activist try to kick me in the face at a press conference," he recalls. "PETA denied that they sent those letters, but they went after me big-time in the press." And while most animal-rights organizations condemned The Justice Department's recent threats of violence, PETA's Newkirk wrote in a November 1999 letter to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Perhaps the mere idea of receiving a nasty missive will allow animal researchers to empathize with their victims for the first time in their lousy careers."...
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