Heartless? The New York Blood Center has a chimpanzee problem

Anyone who believes that people who work in the nonprofit sector are ipso facto morally superior to the rest of us might want to consider the story of The New York Blood Center and the 60 or so chimpanzees that it abandoned last year in Liberia.

The NYBC, as it’s known, is a nonprofit that generated nearly $400 million in revenues last year and had about $480 million in assets, according to Guidestar. It says it can no longer afford to feed the chimpanzees.

By its own account, the NYBC conducted biomedical research on hundreds of chimps between 1974 and 2004, in a partnership with the Liberian ministry of health. Its researchers studied the hepatitis virus, which can threaten the safety of donated blood, at a facility called Vilab II. When the animal testing stopped, the NYBC paid for the feeding of the remaining chimps until March 2015 when the nonprofit “concluded it could no longer divert funds from its important lifesaving mission here at home.”

Read the Full Article by Marc Gunther Here »

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