ANIMAL TESTING USELESS IN DETERMINING COVID VACCINE EFFICACY: EXPERT

Dr. Aysha Akhtar, a neurologist and preventive medicine expert, claims that animal testing is useless in determining the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines among humans.

In an article for Truthout, Akhtar said monkey researchers are cashing in on the pandemic to secure more funds for their research even if there is little evidence to support their contention that the vaccines work on non-human primates (NHPs) the way they do among humans.

“Most findings in animals, including nonhuman primates (NHPs), do not predict human results — and, thus, far from being helpful, they are actually misleading. More than 700 human trials of potential HIV/AIDS vaccines have been conducted, all of which gave encouraging results in animals including monkeys and chimpanzees — yet not one has worked in humans.

In fact, some HIV vaccines actually increase the risk of HIV in humans. And as models of human diseases, NHPs have failed for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, neuroscience/brain research, stroke, cancer, hepatitis C, and many more,” Akhtar argued.

“More than 90 percent of drugs that appear to be safe and effective in animals fail in human trials. Vaccine development has an even higher failure rate. Only 6 percent of vaccines make it to the market. Can you imagine if you boarded a plane, and the pilot announced that you have a 6 percent chance of landing safely at your destination? You would demand an overhaul of the entire airline industry. Yet, when it comes to the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines and drugs we put into our bodies, monkey researchers want you to believe that clinging to the tools of old (i.e., monkeys) is a good idea. We don’t see anyone suggesting we should stick to the 8-track tape when we can stream music on our phones,” the doctor explained.

“Biomedical research is increasingly utilizing innovative techniques that are human-specific. These techniques include human mini-organs (organoids) and human organs-on-a-chip, where 3D cultures of human cells are housed on small chips, with circulatory systems and other means of mimicking real-life function and physiology of actual human organs and the human body. These techniques are being used ever more widely in disease research and in drug discovery and development and were used in pivotal stages of the COVID-19 vaccine development, alongside computational approaches to their design. Entire human immune systems can be cultured, as can lymph nodes (pivotal to immune function) specific to individual people to reflect interhuman variability, and reflective of both diseased and healthy states — all without the confounding issues of extrapolation between different species,” Dr. Akhtar concluded.

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