The Assault on Science
By Danielle Ofri
The Atlantic
How can we prevent our suicidal patients from killing themselves? That’s an important question for a primary-care physician like me. I am often in the position of trying to assess—in 15 minutes or less—which patients need urgent treatment. The type of guidance that might help me can be found in a paper that was published in 2022 on PSNet, the Patient Safety Network, a federally funded initiative. “Few considerations are more critical,” the authors wrote, “than identifying a person at risk for taking their own life.”
On January 31, however, the authors of that paper received a notice that their peer-reviewed article had been struck from the PSNet website. Apparently, it violated Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” signed by Donald Trump on his first day in office.
In addition to being a physician, I happen to be a woman, so I was curious why women needed defending from an analysis of how health professionals might better help suicidal patients. In the paper, the authors reminded clinicians to keep in mind which patient groups are known to be at higher risk, citing peer-reviewed data: “High risk groups include male sex, being young, veterans, Indigenous tribes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ).” The acknowledgment of transgender people, however peripheral, was apparently enough to invite the ax.
The memo came out on a Wednesday, and agencies had until 5 p.m. on Friday to scrub their websites—as well as their agencies, grants, contracts, and personnel—of anything that might “promote or inculcate gender ideology.” As a result, hundreds of government websites were shorn of articles, pages, and data sets about transgender issues, along with information on contraception, HIV, and abortion.
Much of the information that was stripped came from the CDC website, but even pages on the Census Bureau and the National Park Service sites came down. The tech-news publication 404 Media has estimated that more than 2,000 data sets have disappeared from government websites since Trump took office.
Coupled with other recent actions—pulling out of the World Health Organization, muzzling communications from government health agencies, stopping funding for overseas programs that treat HIV and malaria, drastically cutting NIH research funding—the Trump administration is signaling its contempt for evidence-based science and doing so in a way that demonstrates its sweeping disregard for human health and life.
(read full article in The Atlantic)