America Is Running Low on a Crucial Resource for COVID-19 Vaccines: Monkeys are scarce

[riversedge]

America Is Running Low on a Crucial Resource for COVID-19 Vaccines

The country is facing a monkey shortage.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/08/america-facing-monkey-shortage/615799/



Sarah Zhang August 31, 2020



In the past seven months, more than 100 COVID-19 vaccines, therapies, and drugs have been pushed into development. But for any of these treatments to make it to humans, they usually have to face another animal first: a monkey. And here, scientists in the United States say they are facing a bottleneck. There just aren’t enough monkeys to go around.

“Nationally, there is basically a big shortage,” says Koen Van Rompay, an infectious-disease scientist at the California National Primate Research Center. Primate research in the U.S. is expensive and often controversial, making it challenging even in normal circumstances. The pandemic has made acquiring monkeys even harder. “We can’t find any rhesus any longer. They’ve completely disappeared,” says Mark Lewis, the CEO of Bioqual, a contract research organization that specializes in animal testing. Scientists in academia and industry alike are all competing for a limited pool of monkeys.



The reasons for the shortage are threefold. First, COVID-19 has created extraordinary demand for monkeys. Second, this coincided with a massive drop in supply from China, which provided 60 percent of the nearly 35,000 monkeys imported to the U.S. last year and which shut off exports after COVID-19 hit. And third, these pandemic-related events are exacerbating preexisting monkey shortfalls. A 2018 National Institutes of Health report had found that NIH-funded national primate centers would be unable to meet future demand and specifically discussed a “strategic monkey reserve” to provide “surge capability for unpredictable disease outbreaks.” A disease outbreak is upon us; the strategic monkey reserve was never created.


Furthermore, monkeys infected with COVID-19 have to be kept in Animal Biosafety Level 3 labs, which have specific design and ventilation requirements to prevent the spread of pathogens. The U.S. has a limited number of ABSL-3 labs................................................




https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/3t1yuc7veCaawOniaTEtbCDm2YE=/0x12:4422x2498/720x405/media/img/mt/2020/08/GettyImages_1214819317/original.jpg
A monkey in a research lab
Cynomolgus macaques from Asia are widely used in biomedical research Mladen Antonov / AFP /Getty

[LakeVermilion]

1. Everything he touches...

is doomed to failure.

[LisaL]

2. We also had a big push from "animal rights" groups to limit use of animals, especially

monkeys and apes, in research.
Which is all well and good (nobody wants to see animals suffer), until there is something like global pandemic.

[Klaralven]

4. I would have thought that major pharma corporations would have labs in more favorable countries?

Its just another business activity that has been driven offshore.

It's probably more of a problem for academics in the US.

[Historic NY]

3. Trump must have some volunteers.....

[Atticus]

5. I read somewhere that scientists have found a more suitable animal for lab experiments: Trumpies.

Researchers are much less likely to get attached to a Trumpie and there are some things that rats and monkeys just won't do.