The Trump Administration has eliminated more than $ 800 million in research on the health of LGBTQ people, abandoning studies and viruses that tend to affect members of sexual minority groups and delay efforts to defeat the axily or federal data by New York Times.
According to its deep opposition to both diversity programs and the attention affirmed by gender for adolescents, the administration has worked aggressively to eliminate research on capital measures and transgender health.
But its repression has reverberated far beyond these problems, eliminating the strips of medical research on diseases that disproportionately afflict LGBTQ people, a group that includes almost 10 percent of American adults.
Of the 669 subsidies that the National Health Institutes had canceled in its entirety or partly in early May, at least 323, almost half of them, related to LGBTQ health, chrived a review for the times of each finished subsidy.
Federal officials had allocated $ 806 million for canceled projects, many of which were expected to obtain more funds in the coming years.
Dozens of research institutions lost funds, a list includes not only White House objectives such as Johns Hopkins and Columbia, but also public universities in the south and the west medium, such as the State University of Ohio and the University of Alabama in Birmingham.
In Florida State University, $ 41 million were canceled in research, including a great effort to prevent HIV in adolescents and young adults, who experience a fifth of new infections in the United States every year.
In the termination letters in the last two months, the NIF justified the cuts of scientists in the count that their LGBTQ work “no longer makes the priorities of the agency.” In some cases, the agency said that canceled research had “based on gender identity”, which resulted in “non -scientific” results that ignored “biological realities.”
Other termination letters told scientists that their studies were wrong to be “based mainly on artificial and non -scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives.”
The cuts follow an increase in federal funds for LGBTQ investigation during the last decade, and the active stimulus of NIH for the proposals for subsidies focused on groups of sexual minorities and gender that began the administration of Obama.
President Trump’s allies have argued that the investigation triggers with ideological bias.
“There has been an abuse train of science to adapt to a preconceived conclusion,” said Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation, the group of conservative experts that helped formulate some policies of the Trump administration.
“And that was based on a non -scientific premise that biology is effective irrelevant, and a political project to try to incorporate the notion that people could change the change sex.”
The scientists said that the cancellation of research on such a wide range of diseases related to effective sexual and gender minorities created a hierarchy of patients, some more worthy than others.
“Certain people in the United States should not be treated as second -class research subjects,” said Simon Rosser, a professor at the University of Minesota whose laboratory studied cancer in LGBTQ people before it was significant financing.
“That, I think, is the definition of intolerance of anyone,” he added. “Bantotry in science.”
Canceled projects are among the most vivid manifestations of a broad dismantling of infrastructure that for 80 years has supported medical research in the United States.
Beyond the completion of the studies, federal officials have agitated the process of creating subsidies through slow walking payments, delaying subsidy review meetings and reducing new subsidy awards.
The largest changes can be in the store: Mr. Trump proposed on Friday to reduce the NIH budget from approximately $ 48 billion to $ 27 billion, quoting in part what he described as the agency’s efforts to promote “radical gender ideology.”
The legality of mass terminations is an uncle. Two separate demands that challenge the revocation of a wide range of subsidies, one presented by a group of researchers, and the other by 16 states, argued that the Trump administration had not offered a legal reason for the cuts.
The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comments.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health, told The Daily Signal, a conservative publication, last month that the movement “far from the political studies of Dei and gender ideology” was in “according to the president’s executive orders.”
The NIH said in a statement: “NIH is an action to finish the financing of the investigation that is not aligned with the priorities of the NIH and the HHS. We continue to restore our agency to its tradition of defending the science of standard gold evidence.”
LGBTQ cuts ended studies on antibiotic resistance, non -diagnosed autism in sexual minority groups and certain throat cancers and other cancers that description affect those groups. Financing losses have led to some LGBTQ laboratories that only had a recent section in preparation to expand.
The NIH used to reserve subsidy cancellations for rare cases of bad research behavior or possible damage to the participants. The last cuts, far from protecting research participants, are putting them in danger, scientists said.
They cited the clinical or re -recessive trials, which have now run out of federal funds to serve voluntary participants.
“We are stopping things that prevent suicide and prevention of sexual violence,” said Katie Edwards, a professor at the University of Michigan, whose funds for several clinical trials involving LGBTQ people were canceled.
HIV research has been particularly affected.
The NIH ended several important subsidies to the adolescent medicine test network for HIV/AIDS intervention, a program that had helped to lay the foundations for adolescents use of a drug regime that can prevent infections.
That regime, known as prophylaxis prior to the exposure, or PREP, is attributed to help overcome the disease in young people.
The cuts to the program have in danger a continuous judgment of a product that would avoid both HIV and pregnancy and a second trial that seeks to combine advice on sexual health with behavioral therapy to reduce the spread of HIV in men of young sexual minorities who use stimulants.
Together with the termination of boxes from other HIV studies, the cuts have undermined Trump’s declared objective of his first mandate to end the country’s HIV epidemic in a decade, scientists said.
The NIH ended the work in other transmitted diseases as well.
Dr. Matthew Spinelli, a researcher of infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, was in the middle of a clinical essay of Doxycycline, a common antibiotic that, taken after sex, can avoid some infections with syphilis, gonorrhea and clamidia.
The essay was, he said, “as nerd as it is put”: a randomized study in which the participants received different antibiotic regimes to see how it metabolizes.
I expected the findings to help scientists understand the effectiveness of drugs in women, and also their potential to cause drug resistance, a group that the Secretary of State Framework Rubio had expressed in the past.
But health officials, citing their opposition to research regarding “gender identity”, arrested the funds for the experiment in March. That left Dr. Spinelli without federal funds to monitor the people of the boxes who had already been taking the antibiotic.
It also puts the thousands of doses that Dr. Spinelli had bought with money from taxpayers at risk of waste. He said that stopping work in diseases such as syphilis and HIV would allow new outbreaks to be extended.
“The HIV epidemic will explode again as results of these actions,” said Dr. Spinelli, who added that he was speaking only for himself, not for his university. “It is devastating for affected communities.”
Despite a recently emphasis on transition discounts, federal officials canceled several subsidies that examine the potential risks of hormonal therapy affirming gender. The projects analyzed whether hormonal therapy could, for example, increase the risk of breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, altered brain development or HIV.
Other subsidies finished examined ways of addressing mental illnesses in transgender people, who now compensate for high school students and report sharply higher rates of persistent sadness and suicide attempts.
For Dr. Edwards, from the University of Michigan, the funds stopped for a clinical trial that analyzed how online tutoring could reduce depression and self -harm among transgender adolescents, one of the six studies of his who were canceled.
Another examined the interventions so that the families of LGBTQ young people promote more support and, in turn, reduce the violence of the appointments and the consumption of alcohol among young people.
NIH classifies research only by certain diseases, which makes it difficult to know how much money the agency to LGBTQ health. But a report in March estimated that this investigation represented less than 1 percent of the NIH portfolio for a decade.
The Times sought to understand the finished financing scale for LGBTQ investigation by reviewing the titles and, in many cases, research summaries for each of the 669 large that the Trump administration said it had canceled or partly canceled or Earlyy.
Beyond subsidies related to LGBTQ people and diseases and treatments that have disproportionate cost about them, the times included in their counting studies that were designed to recruit particles of sexual groups and gender minority.
It was excluded grants diseases such as HIV that focused on non -LGBTQ patients.
While the Times examined only NIH research subsidies, the Trump administration is also finishing or retaining LGBTQ programs in other parts of the Federal Health System. It has proposed, for example, to discard a direct suicide line for young LGBTQ.
Research cuts can make a field that in the last decade had not only grown, but also covers a broader range of threats of diseases beyond HIV.
Already, scientists said, younger researchers are losing jobs in sexual research and gender minorities and cleaning their online evidence biographies that they once worked in the field.
Five obline subsidies by Brittany Charlton, professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, have been canceled, including one that analyzes fetal death rates among LGBTQ women.
The end of research on disease threats for gender groups and sexual minorities, he said, would inevitably recover throughout the population. “When other people are sick around you, it affects you, even if you can think no,” he said.
Irena Hwang Contributed reports.
