OPINION: Is animal testing of vaccines justified?

Vaccines are extremely important in our everyday lives, but no one stops to wonder how these vaccines are tested. Most of them (all of them in America) are tested on animals. If a person took medicine or got a shot that was not tested on animals, then they have a higher risk of getting rashes, coughing, and feeling very sick. Animal testing has been a very popular process for over a century. Decades of animal research have given us cures and treatments for many diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria to name a few. Soap, makeup, and vaccines are tested almost daily for the sake of the safety of people. Everyone can use these products in their everyday lives and know that these are safe because of all of the testing that had been done beforehand. Nevertheless, there are some questions being asked about how efficient this testing process really is.

First of all, how do we know if this testing is reliable? The animals that are used for testing are usually chimpanzees, rats, and mice. Chimps share 99% of their DNA with humans, and rats and mice share more than 98% of their DNA with humans. Using these animals makes the testing reliable because the item being tested will work in the same way for a human and that animal.

Second of all, people claim that testing on animals is a complete waste. Why kill a living organism for the sake of testing when you can use other alternatives? Well, there are other methods of testing, such as in vitro, which means testing on a cell and is the most common alternative. This method would definitely be safer and less expensive, but it is not as reliable. The human body, and the bodies of most animals, are a complex system of different organs and cells. Testing on one cell can determine how the testing substance will work, but only on that particular cell. Biologists have no way to determine how it will affect other cells and organs. If the substance being tested doesn’t affect the cell it was tested on, but it harms the rest of the body, isn’t that more harmful and expensive than testing on an animal?

Lastly, we would not be able to make as many medical breakthroughs as we have now if any at all. Many diseases such as diabetes have grown so common due to pollution and poor eating habits that even babies are born with this symptom. Insulin, which is commonly tested on animals, has saved millions of lives, and we may not even have this cure if it weren’t for the research done on animals. Tuberculosis was also a very common cause of death, even amongst farm animals. So in 1943, scientists injected streptomycin on a guinea pig with this disease, and this discovery found a treatment of tuberculosis for both humans and animals. Hence, we can say that animal testing can be greatly beneficial.

Since animal testing does raise several ethical questions, we do need to find an alternative way to test vaccines and medicines. The National Animal Interest Alliance (NAIA) is considering using other methods of testing instead of animal testing. However, animal testing has saved billions of lives, some even of animals, and is also the basis of veterinary research. Hence, this is a procedure we need in our world, and we should not remove it; only find safer alternatives to do so.

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Writer: Sandali Srivastava

Editor: Akriti Nepal