WASHINGTON — Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced Wednesday that his agency would renew its commitment to end the testing of chemicals on mammals by 2035.
The first Trump administration EPA set a deadline to end the practice by that year, but the Biden administration abandoned the 2035 deadline and delayed scientific progress on finding alternative methods that do not require testing on mammals. In an EPA press conference held Wednesday, Zeldin announced the agency would once again commit itself to reducing animal testing by finding scientific alternatives ahead of the nine-year deadline.
“We will continue to aggressively pursue opportunities to reduce animal testing as quickly as possible,” said Zeldin in response to the Daily Caller News Foundation when asked what the next steps for the agency will be. “This 2035 date is viewed as more than just a goal. It is a deadline that absolutely can and must be met. Innovations continue to improve and we will always be seeking to validate new methods that will allow us to reduce animal testing as much as possible and as quickly as possible.”
“The wasteful Biden EPA animal testing is not the gold standard science that this administration is committed to. It’s fool’s gold,” White Coat Waste (WCW) senior vice president Justin Goodman said at the press conference. “When President Trump was re-elected and he nominated Lee Zeldin to lead the EPA, we knew a course correction was coming imminently, especially because, as a congressman, White Coat Waste awarded Mr. Zeldin for helping us enact a first in government policy that completely eliminated cruel dog testing at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.”
WCW, a nonprofit watchdog that opposes animal testing, notably exposed National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), then led by Dr. Anthony Fauci for funding abusive experiments on beagle puppies such as infecting the beagles with disease-causing parasites to test an experimental drug on them. Another experiment involved infecting beagles with heartworm larvae and euthanizing the puppies six-months later after extracting the larvae for further experimentation.
Zeldin signed a memo at the end of the conference, signifying the EPA’s renewed commitment to ending animal testing by 2035 and was joined by the guest speakers and Oliver, a beagle rescued from a facility that breeds dogs for scientific testing.
Former EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler, Humane World Action Fund president Sara Amundson, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) regulatory toxicology head Dr. Amy Clippinger, and Institute for In Vitro Sciences vice president Hans Raabe also spoke at the press conference in support of the renewed commitment to reducing animal testing.
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