The Public Policy: Getty's Fortune
Sugg, Ike C.
"The Public Policy: Getty's Fortune" Animal-rights activists wish this AIDS patient were dead....
...But from Paul and Linda McCartney to Alec Baldwin and Kim Bassinger, the star circuit is abuzz over this latest celebrity cause...
...Nevertheless, for the moment Hollywood seems to have taken its stand on the issue...
...I wish that you had died," fumed one anonymous caller...
...On December 1+ 1995, he went into the operating room at San Francisco General...
...What makes this face-off so explosive is that, unlike the dozens of other modish causes adopted in celebrity circles-which can be reconciled with one another quite easily enough-AIDS research and the animal-rights movement are completely incompatible...
...IKE C. SUGG is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C...
...But Etheridge had a change of heart in April, when she came out in the Advocate, a leading gay and lesbian publication, to announce her break with PETA...
...My father died of cancer and I've lost many friends to AIDS," she said...
...And that doesn't trouble them in the slightest...
...Given the misanthropy of groups like PETA, it's hard to believe that last year a New York magazine poll found animal rights to be the "number one hip cause in America," eclipsing the homeless and even AIDS...
...We don't have the right to use animals as if they were parts off the shelf," says Megan Patterson, a PETA spokeswoman...
...Struggling against such fatuousness are groups such as AMP, which took out a full-page ad in Daily Variety on the day of this year's Academy Awards...
...People bring diseases on themselves...
...The Red Ribbon You'll Wear Tonight Tells the World You've Made a Choice," it read...
...Asked once which he would save, a dog or a baby, if a boat capsized in the ocean, Regan responded: "If it were a retarded baby and bright dog, I'd save the dog...
...As Peter Stahley, founder of the Treatment Action Group in New York, puts it, "PETA is a threat to my life...
...Nobody had ever survived the procedure before...
...49 The American Spectator October 1996...
...Actors And Others For Animals is selling a blue animal awareness ribbon, "so that all of us, all of the time, can show our appreciation for all of earth's inhabitants...
...Indeed, almost every Nobel prize for medicine awarded since the turn of the century required some kind of animal research...
...Some animal rights activists have even sabotaged AIDS research facilities, in the process costing patients not only more money but also valuable time...
...Such claims infuriate animal rights activists...
...A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy...
...Like thousands of people with life-threatening illnesses, Getty was fighting for his life against the FDA's delay in approving new drugs and experimental medical treatments...
...m rJ T H E P U B L I C P O L I C Y .r_ Getty's Fortune Animal-rights activists wish this AIDS patient were dead...
...His already ravaged immune system would be virtually destroyed with chemotherapy and radiation...
...We found out through animal testing," he insists...
...And the baboon had lived...
...Baldwin's response was a nasty letter to AMP: "I will be forced to sue you...
...Don't get the disease in the first place, schmo...
...We have no basic right...
...Ingrid Newkirk, the group's founder, is more to the point...
...Bassinger posed nude in PETA's "I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur" campaign ads, as did models Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, and Christy Turlington, as well as openly gay singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge...
...So I do believe in animals losing their lives to eradicate cancer and AIDS from our lives...
...If animal rights activists had their way 50 years ago," he says, "we'd be sitting around talking about the hundreds of thousands of people dying of polio...
...Jones became a target of harassment after serving as the 1995 grand marshal of the Gay Rodeo-rodeos, of course, are also anathema to the animal-rights lobby...
...In fact, says NIH director Dr...
...So there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights...
...Counters Getty: "In the animal extremists' world, rats live and I die...
...But at last Getty finally got the govern...
...He also argued in the letter that "the overwhelming majority of [animal research] can now be accomplished with cell research and computer modeling...
...Doctors had given him a year to live at most, unless he was willing to undergo a highly dangerous and experimental operation...
...Bu North Carolina State University Philosophy Professor Tom Regan, widely regarded as the intellectual guru of the animal rights movement, doesn't see it that way...
...You can't be for AIDS research AND Animal Rights...
...I got death threats from these people," claims Cleve Jones, founder of the Names Project, better known in straight circles as "the Quilt...
...Steven Deeks, who helped perform the transplant, says, "Jeff's health has clearly improved...
...Arson, by the C. Sugg property destruction, burglary, and theft are `acceptable crimes' when used for the animal cause," declares PETA chairman Alex Pacheco...
...The Humane Society had filed a complaint with the National Institutes of Health to bar the operation...
...ment's permission...
...What really irks animal rights activists is that Getty paved the way for future transplants by proving the procedure is safe...
...The only reason they have renewed their attacks is because I am not...
...While in the hospital recuperating from his transplant, he received several threatening phone calls...
...The Hollywood moralizers must thus choose their symbols very carefully...
...Jeff Getty was in the hospital fighting for his life...
...In fact, says Prozac manufacturer Eli Lilly & Co., the drug was "extensively" tested on animals before it went to market...
...David Wasser, for example, claims that Prozac was "designed and tested entirely in humans...
...That's when we decided to throw our hat in the ring...
...But even if the transplant were to fail, Getty believed, helping to find a cure for AIDS was worth dying for...
...I've been on AZT and other drugs, and I'm alive because they were tested on animals first...
...His solution...
...It's clear to me that they wish I were dead," Getty says...
...He also recalls that more than 1oo,ooo rhesus monkeys were sacrificed in the search for a polio cure...
...Without animal research, people who could be saved will die...
...You can't be for AIDS, breast cancer, and diabetes research," Getty points out, "and also support militant animal rights groups...
...not to be harmed by those natural diseases we are heir to," Regan wrote in his 1983 opus, The Case for Animal Rights...
...He was booed off the stage...
...When Christopher Reeve gave a 1990 speech at the fifth annual "March for the Animals Celebrity Gala," he sug gested that "some" animal testing should be allowed, specifically citing AIDS research...
...Even though Getty's body rejected the baboon cells, he says, "I'm feeling better than ever...
...until you are bleeding from your eyeballs...
...Killing any sentient being is morally wrong," says Robin Webb of the Animal Liberation Front...
...If they had admitted failure, and had decided not to waste any more time and money, that would be one 48 October x996 . The American Spectator thing," says PETA spokesman Dan Mathews...
...Even celebrities have clamored to join the animal rights crusade...
...If the animal rights lobby had their way, Jeff Getty might well be dead today...
...Dear Alec Baldwin and other celebrity supporters of animal rights," the ad read, "when you help PETA this is who you hurt the most....Millions of suffering people like Baby John, who was born with a deadly heart defect, count on animal research to save their lives...
...Three weeks later, he left the hospital triumphant: "To the naysayers, who said that I would never recover from this procedure, well, here I am and you were wrong...
...While Jones understood why some people might view certain rodeo events as cruel to animals, he could not fathom his opponents' fanatical hostility...
...But, bearing in mind the number of animal lives it would save and the amount of suffering it would relieve, I would not weep for the individual vivisector...
...Joseph E. Murray, a professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School who won a Nobel in 199o for his research on organ transplants, says, "It is impossible to champion AIDS research without using animal experimentation...
...But he is hardly the only person being hounded by the animal-rights movement...
...If T - cells from a baboon's bone marrow could survive in Getty's body, his doctors thought, they might just save his life...
...AIDS is arguably more deadly than depression...
...No animals were used at all...
...If abandoning animal research means that there are some things we cannot learn, then so be it...
...Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal," Newkirk told Vogue...
...When you're trying to fight a retrovirus, animal testing is not only appropriate but critical...
...I believe in that...
...We have a lazy, sick society," he sniffs...
...Getty is no stranger to such twisted sentiments...
...I don't appreciate PETA's willingness to help me into my coffin...
...And, like many an activist group before them, PETA even supports the commission of illegal acts to further its struggle...
...Nine months after posing in the ad with her lover, Julie Cypher, Etheridge renounced her association with the organization...
...But now we know that the [University of Pittsburgh] researcher is going to ask the FDA for approval for yet another experiment...
...I was trying to help raise money for AIDS research," he says exasperatedly...
...People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) had launched a massive PR campaign against the FDA with the same objective...
...Harold Varmus, "studying animals is essential to virtually all phases of medical research...
...then Getty would receive injections of the baboon's bone marrow...
...Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh had discovered that baboons can withstand huge injections of HIV without ever contracting AIDS...
...But activists such as Mathews, who feel such compassion for animals, have little left over for humans...
...The FDA was worried that the operation itself might kill him, but as Getty told CNN, "I'm in a situation where I'm going to die anyhow...
...Virtually every medical breakthrough in this century has come about through animal research...
...Animal rights groups reportedly spend some $2oo million a year to fight for their cause-and the success of Getty's procedure only insures that the fight will intensify...
...Unlike other awareness ribbons, says the group, the "oneof-a-kind emblem features a delightful dog and cat to encourage curiosity and discussion about animals...
...He says he feels better today than he has in five years...
...Even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, Newkirk said in a 1989 Vogue interview, "we'd be against it...
...Jeff Getty, however, tells of one promising new drug that looked perfectly safe in the computer model, but would have been deadly in the human immune system...
...For the new generation of animal rights activists, however, such research is a moral abomination...
...Getty was also facing another challenge...
...Suffering from the advanced stages of AIDS, his T-cell count had dropped so low they could be counted by hand...
...The main thing that animal research tells [those] who are taking these drugs is that they're safe...
...In fact, PETA began opposing the procedure at a press conference in the summer of 1995, several months before the operation...
...Almost a year later, his T - cell count is up, and he's off almost all the medications he was taking before the surgery...
...As former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop puts it, "We would be in absolute, utter darkness about AIDS if we hadn't done decades of basic research in animal retroviruses...
...Just before Bassinger and her husband Alec Baldwin had their baby in January, Americans for Medical Progress, a leading biomedical research advocacy group, took out a large ad in the Los Angeles Times showing a photo of an AMP employee's son on life support...
Vol. 29 • October 1996 • No. 10
