Distortion

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

NEW YORK––AIDS patient Jeff
Getty, who received an experimental baboon
bone marrow transplant in December, decried
“the tactics of distortion” in a June 13 Wall
Street Journal op-ed essay, which is apparently
to be offered to other newspapers, but evidently
was never fact-checked.
According to Getty, “AIDS
researchers at Stanford University were forced
to build labs and complexes underground following
attacks on university property carried out
in the name of animal rights.”

In truth, as coverage in the San Jose
Mercury-News and the Palo Alto Weekly specified,
the primary reason for the underground
construction was to securely contain work
involving “hot” viruses and recombinant DNA,
as demanded by the Santa Clara County Board
of Supervisors, pressured by the Silicon Valley
Toxics Coalition.
Also according to Getty, “The
Progressive Animal Welfare Society, an animal
rights group, has targeted a Washington state
researcher and successfully shut down, for a
time, research involving mother-to-child transmission
[of simian immunodeficiency virus,
related to AIDS] among macaque monkeys.”
The researcher was Dr. Hans Ochs of
the University of Washington, whose grant
request was rejected by the National Institutes
of Health in February 1989. According to the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer of February 20, 1989,
Ochs told United Press International, “I do not
think that the campaign of PAWS has really
done anything to affect that grant.” The project,
Ochs said, was approved in principle, but was
assigned a low funding priority because some