Harvard doctors' research articles must be restored after Trump admin sued

Yahoo

24-05-2025

Research articles written by two doctors at Harvard Medical School must be restored after they sued the Trump administration, the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday.
The research was previously on the Patient Safety Network, a federal website for doctors and medical researchers to share information about medical errors, misdiagnoses, and patient outcomes, the ACLU said in a statement.
Two articles, one called 'Endometriosis: A Common and Commonly Missed and Delayed Diagnosis,' the other called 'Multiple Missed Opportunities for Suicide Risk Assessment in Emergency and Primary Care Settings,' were previously removed from the Patient Safety Network.
The initial article, co-authored by plaintiff Dr. Celeste Royce, had a sentence about diagnosis in transgender and gender-nonconforming people, the ACLU stated. The other article, co-authored by plaintiff Dr. Gordon Schiff, incorporated a sentence about heightened risk in LGBTQ+ communities.
'This type of wholesale, non-evidence-based removal endangers everyone's safety,' Schiff said in the statement. 'Censoring information about transgender people or anyone a politician does not like, who have documented increased risks of negative health outcomes, is antithetical to the very mission of public health. It also has a clear ripple effect on each and every patient, whose doctors are now unable to review unbiased information about how to better care for all.'
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January, shortly after taking office, that directed federal agencies to remove all statements that 'promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology,' the ACLU's statement read.
This was followed by guidance issued by the Office of Personal Management, which told agencies to '[t]ake down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology.'
The Trump administration is 'putting a culture war above the rights of clinicians and the public's need for accurate, adequate health information,' Royce said in the statement. 'The very foundations of medical research and trust in medicine are at risk if the government can pick and choose what kind of research gets halted or published.'
Royce and Schiff, represented by the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, the ACLU and the ACLU of Massachusetts, argued in the lawsuit that the deletion of the research violated the First Amendment. It also violated the Administrative Procedure Act by removing articles without a reasoned basis
'The takedown of these articles is nothing short of an assault on science,' Scarlet Kim, the senior staff attorney at the ACLU, said in the statement.
'The First Amendment protects against the removal of our clients' research solely because the government disagrees with its message. The government cannot suppress medical knowledge because it acknowledges the existence of transgender people,' Kim continued. 'The Trump administration's attempt to do so violates the First Amendment and flouts the very mandate of PSNet to improve patient safety.'
On Friday, a federal judge issued that the articles must be restored within seven days. It also must be 'complete, unaltered versions.'
The removal of the research came as the Trump administration had several cuts to programs and departments across the federal government.
This also included those that go against his executive orders on LGBTQ+ people, including one defining two genders and a military ban on transgender service members, among other orders.
'This is a victory for our clients, for free speech, and for scientific integrity,' said Kim. 'The First Amendment protects against the removal of our clients' research solely because the government disagrees with its message. PSNet's mandate is to provide information that protects patients – the government can't pick and choose which information to share based on ideology.'
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Read the original article on MassLive.