Trump’s administration has abolished more than $ 800 million in research on LGBTQ human health, abandonment of cancers and viruses that tend to influe Times.
According to its deep opposition to both the diversity programs and the care of adolescents, the administration worked aggressively to eliminate research that touches on shares and transsexual health.
But its repression has resonated beyond these issues, eliminating medical research in diseases that disproportionately affect LGBTQ people, a group that includes almost 10 % of American adults.
Of the 669 grants that the National Institutes of Health had canceled in whole or in part by the beginning of May, at least 323 – almost half of them – associated with LGBTQ Health, according to a review of the times of each terminated grant.
Federal officials had been allocated $ 806 million for canceled projects, many of which were expected to get more funding in the coming years.
The results of research institutions lost funding, a list that includes not only White House goals such as Johns Hopkins and Columbia, but also public universities in the south and Midwest, such as the University of Ohio and the University of Alabama in Birmingham.
At the University of Florida, the $ 41 million research was canceled, including an important effort to prevent HIV in adolescents and young adults, who are experiencing one fifth of new infections in the United States each year.
In the finish letters in the last two months, NIH justified cuts by telling scientists that their work LGBTQ “no longer affects the priorities of the services”. In some cases, the organization said the canceled research had been “based on gender identity”, which caused “non -scientific” results that ignored “biological realities”.
Other terminus letters told scientists that their studies have been mistaken by “based mainly on artificial and non -scientific categories, including amorphous shares”.
The cuts follow the increase in federal funding for LGBTQ research over the last decade, and the active encouragement by NIH on grant proposals focused on groups of sexual and sex minorities that began during Obama’s administration.
President Trump’s allies have argued that the research was transferred with ideological bias.
“There has been a train of abuse of science to fit a preliminary conclusion,” said Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Think Tank that helped shaping some Trump’s political administration.
“And this was based on a non -scientific condition that biology is essentially irrelevant and a political work trying to focus on the idea that people could change their gender.”
Scientists have said that the cancellation of research into such a wide range of diseases associated with minority sexual and sexual groups effectively created a hierarchy of patients, some more remarkable than others.
“Some people in the United States should not be treated as second -class research issues,” said Simon Rosser, a professor at the University of Minnesota, whose laboratory studied cancer in LGBTQ people before significant funding.
“This, I think, is someone’s definition of fanaticism,” he added. “House in Science.”
Cancelled projects are one of the most vibrant events of a widespread infrastructure disassembly that has supported 80 years of medical research in all the United States.
In addition to ending studies, federal officials have unfolded the process of producing slow payments, delaying grant review meetings and the escalation of new grants.
The biggest changes may be in the store: Mr Trump on Friday suggested that the NIH budget be reduced from about $ 48 billion to $ 27 billion, partially stating what it described as the organization’s efforts to promote “radical ideology”.
The legitimacy of mass terminuses is unclear. Two separate lawsuits that question the revocation of a wide range of grants – one filed by a team of researchers and the other with 16 states – argued that Trump’s administration had not provided legal rationale for cuts.
The White House and the Ministry of Health and Human Services did not respond to commentary requests.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Health Department, told The Daily Signal, a conservative publication last month, that the move “away from the politicized studies of Dei and Gender Ideology” was in “according to the president’s executive orders”.
NIH said in a statement: “NIH is taking action to end research funding that is not in line with the priorities of NIH and HHS. We remain committed to restoring our service in surrendering to support the scientific scientific science based on evidence.”
LGBTQ cuts have ended studies on antibiotic resistance, non -diagnosed autism in groups of sexual minorities and certain throats and other cancers that disproportionately affect these groups. Funding losses have led to fire in some LGBTQ laboratories, which were just recently prepared to expand.
NIH used to maintain grant cancellations for rare cases of research misconduct or possible damage to participants. The latest cuts, far from protecting participants in research, are damaged, scientists said.
They referred to the launch of clinical trials, which have now been left without federal funding for the care of volunteers.
“We stop the things that prevent suicide and prevent sexual violence,” said Katie Edwards, a professor at the University of Michigan, whose funding for several clinical trials involving LGBTQ people has been canceled.
HIV research has been particularly cruel.
NIH has finished several important grants on the HIV/AIDS medical network network, a program that has helped to put the basis for the use of adolescents of a drug that can prevent infections.
This figure, known as pre -exhibition prophylaxis, or prep, is credited with the help of the disease to young people.
The cuts in the program have threatened an ongoing test of a product that would prevent both HIV and pregnancy and a second test that examines the combination of sexual health counseling with behavioral therapy to reduce HIV spread to young sexual minority men who use stimulants.
Along with the end of dozens of other HIV studies, cuts undermined Mr Trump’s stated target of his first term to end the country’s HIV epidemic over a decade, scientists said.
NIH was also terminated in other sexually transmitted diseases.
Dr. Matthew Spinelli, a researcher of infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, was in the middle of a doxycycline clinical test, a common antibiotic that, taken after sex, can prevent some infections with syphilis.
The test was, he said, “as it takes as it takes”: a randomized study in which participants received different shapes of the antibiotic to see how it is metabolized.
He hopes that the findings would help scientists to understand the effectiveness of drugs in women and also the ability to cause drug resistance, a concern that Foreign Minister Marco Rubio had previously expressed.
However, healthcare employees, referring to their opposition to research on “gender identity”, stopped funding for the experiment in March. This left Dr. Spinelli without any federal funding for half -dozen monitoring that the antibiotic had already taken.
He also put on the thousands of installments that Dr. Spinelli had bought taxpayers at risk of waste. He said that the interruption of work in diseases such as syphilis and HIV would allow the spread of new restaurants.
“The HIV epidemic is going to explode again as a result of these actions,” said Dr. Spinelli, who added that he was talking only about himself, not about his university. “Is catastrophic for the affected communities.”
Despite the recent emphasis on the disadvantages of the transition, federal officials have canceled several grants by examining the potential risks of sex confirmation hormone treatment. Works examined whether hormone therapy could, for example, increase the risk of breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, altered brain development or HIV
Other terminated grants have examined ways to treat transsexual mental illnesses, which now make up about 3 % of high school students and report highly higher rates of persistent sadness and suicide efforts.
For Dr. Edwards of the University of Michigan, funding has stopped for a clinical trial that considering how online guidance could reduce depression and self -injury among transexual adolescents, one of its six canceled studies.
Another examined interventions for the families of young LGBTQ to promote more supportive care and, in turn, to reduce violence and use of alcohol among young people.
NIH categorizes research only by certain diseases, making it difficult to know how much money the body dedicates to LGBTQ Health. But an report in March estimates that this survey was less than 1 % of the NIH portfolio for a decade.
The Times tried to understand the scale of end funding for LGBTQ medical research by examining the titles and, in many cases, surveys of research for each of the 669 grants that the Trump administration stated that it had canceled in whole or in part by the beginning of May.
In addition to grants related to LGBTQ people and diseases and treatments that disproportionately affect their times, the times included in counting studies designed to recruit participants from minority sex and sex groups.
It excludes diseases associated with diseases such as HIV that focused on patients with LGBTQ.
While the Times only examined NIH’s grants, Trump’s administration ends or examines the end of ending LGBTQ programs in other parts of the federal health system. He has proposed, for example, to dismantle a specialized suicide line for new LGBTQ.
Research cuts are standing to cross a field that had not only grown up in the last decade but also to include a wider range of threat of diseases beyond HIV
Already, scientists have said, younger researchers are losing jobs in sexual research and minority of sexes and rubbing the electronic biographies of the evidence that has ever worked in the field.
Five grants received by Brittany Charlton, a professor at the Harvard Public Health School, have been canceled, including one who is considering highly increased mortality rates among LGBTQ women.
The ending of the threat of diseases for sex and sexual minorities, he said, will inevitably recover to the entire population. “When other people are sick around you, it affects you, even if you might think it doesn’t,” he said.
Irene Huang They contributed reports.
