In June 2013, the direction of NIH – National Institute of Health announced with great marketing that it would retire the 310 chimpanzees living in various medical torture centers in the United States. Later, it affirmed that only 50 would be kept as a strategic reserve.

But it’s been over a year and a half and only six chimpanzees were sent to the official Sanctuary of Chimp Havenm in Louisiana, which is authorized to receive them. During this one year and a half, more than 24 chimpanzees died.

CNN tried interviews with Dr. Francis Collins, NIH director, who, claiming busy schedule, did not respond to the invitation.

Dr. Collins words are still fresh, when he made the announcement in June 2013: “We believe (chimpanzees) deserve special consideration as special creatures. It is our responsibility to treat them with respect.”

The six chimpanzees sent to the Sanctuary came from the Anderson Cancer Center, at University of Texas, and were tortured for years in an attempt to develop vaccines for HIV and Hepatitis.

The director of Chimp Haven Sanctuary, Cathy Spraetz, told CNN that she is concerned, since she considers that many of the 310 chimpanzees to be retired will die before reaching the Sanctuary.

Meanwhile, the director of the Anderson Center, Chris Abee, which maintains 150 chimpanzees of NIH in its power and charge daily possibly $ 56 dollars per animal for their maintenance, said he would like to keep them in the place, claiming that when they are not tortured the place becomes a Sanctuary. His hypocritical and shameful statement was made in front of steel cubicles, built especially to keep those unfortunate beings for a lifetime. We’ve been in that place over 10 years ago, when there were 75 chimpanzees. Today this number doubled. At that time, they were beginning to build those steel domes, which, according to them, were built escape proof, as they are exposed cages to keep the chimpanzees for life.

The director of Chimp Haven refuted Chris Abee’s thesis: “”Retired means to Sanctuary. Labs are lots of things, but they are certainly not Sanctuaries, and so it’s important that the chimps come here.”

The stalling of NIH is such that now they claim that the transfer is a complex process and build more enclosures in Chimp Haven needs congressional authorization, after they had committed themselves to finance the work. In the end, the millions of dollars that will be saved by not paying the torture centers that host chimpanzees for years can fund a lot of enclosures.

Everything does indicate that NIH is betting on the untimely death of most chimpanzees of its property spread in the United States and the Final Solution – as Hitler proclaimed a Century ago – is now being put into practice in the most powerful country on the planet, with hundreds of innocent primates who only knew pain and suffering in their lives.

 Dr. Pedro A. Ynterian

President, GAP Project International

Read the full articles with photos: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/06/health/research-chimps-stuck-in-labs/index.html