ASA rules NAVS misleading public

5 January 2015 Posted by: UAR news team Category: Communications & media

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has found the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) guilty of misleading the public in an advertisement they ran earlier this year. The advert claimed that animal safety tests could not accurately predict human reactions; that the UK uses more primates than any other European country and that the TGN1412 Phase One clinical trial disaster could have been avoided by using microdosing. However, the ASA ruled that the claim about primate use was wrong and gave the following assessment:

"The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told NAVS to ensure that claims were appropriately qualified and not to repeat the claims "animal safety tests cannot accurately predict what will happen in humans" and "The TGN 1412 drug trial disaster could have been avoided using a technique known as 'micro-dosing' with spectrometry analysis" in future ads. We told them not to imply claims were universally accepted if that was not the case."

Reacting to the ruling, UAR’s Head of Policy and Media Chris Magee said “Skewed science and cherry-picked data might be enough to fool a layman and attract subscriptions, but fails to stand up to independent scrutiny. It seems clear that this campaign group has made up its mind over the utility of animal research, despite what the evidence clearly shows. While there are strengths and weaknesses to animal models in various scientific applications, there is no doubt that, on balance, they have been indispensable in advancing medical, veterinary and environmental research and we agree with the ASA that it is irresponsible to try to lead members of the public to believe otherwise.”

http://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2014/12/The-National-Anti_Vivisection-Society-Ltd/SHP_ADJ_272715.aspx#.VKvi43umCNQ