28 December—Rest in peace, Brigitte Bardot, animal-rights advocate and vegan who actively fought for animal welfare.

And we never thought we’d be congratulating—and thanking—Secretary of Health and Human Services Bobby Kennedy Jr., but congratulations and thanks certainly are in order for the new policy he announced a week ago to phase out animal experimentation. Following an internal directive from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to its scientists to end all monkey research by year’s end, the policy had in fact been reported in “Science” a month ago.

So RFK Jr.’s “deep commitment” to ending animal testing, specifically calls for an end to the importation of monkeys for scientific studies (i.e., experimentation and vivisection) and closure of the seven National Primate Research Centers. Better yet, the primate concentration camps are to be converted to sanctuaries.

Federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, have been directed to “prioritize” animal-free testing methods for chemicals and drugs. Kennedy accurately and positively maintains that non-human animal testing is often ineffective and that modern methods are more accurate in predicting human health outcomes.

Evidently the humane ball finally started rolling in 2022 when Joe Biden signed into law the bipartisan FDA Modernization Act 2.0, which removed the mandatory and outdated animal requirement for preclinical safety testing of new drugs, allowing instead more advanced and effective human-relevant alternatives like computer models and so-called organs-on-chips—microfluidic devices that mimic human organ functions using living cells in microengineered chips that simulate the structure and function of human organs.

It’s only a start, mind you, and for now eliminates the torture and saves the lives mostly of primates—and only those whose fate is federally sponsored and/or funded. But at least it’s a step, however small, in the right direction. Of course, it’s encouraging. So we can only hope it will prove a giant leap for animal rights . . .