NIH Orders Researchers to Halt HIV Prevention Program for Trans Youth of Color
Them's
Officials at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) have ordered researchers to freeze an adolescent HIV research and prevention program, one of the latest targets in the Trump administration's war against so-called 'gender ideology.'
As the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, a NIH representative instructed some researchers working with the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV Interventions (ATN) to immediately halt work during a Zoom call on January 31.
Specifically targeted by the stop-work order is the ATN's Legal, Economic, and Affirming Peer Support (LEAP) program, a study aimed at improving outcomes for trans and gender-nonconforming youth of color across seven cities and overseen by co-chairs Kristi Gamarel (PhD, EdM) and Sari Reisner (ScD, MA), both health equity researchers at the University of Michigan. The Post reported that NIH, which funds ATN, has suspended LEAP research following Trump's January 20 executive order banning federal agencies from recognizing trans identities.
Multiple trans staff members of color may be fired as a result of the NIH freeze, Gamarel told the Post, but added that the NIH had not yet formalized the stop-work order via any channel besides the Zoom call. In response to an emailed request for comment by Them on Wednesday, Gamarel said that staff 'have not heard anything from the NIH and are still waiting for their guidance.' At the time of writing, the entire ATN website — not just content related to LEAP — was offline, and its homepage replaced with a statement asserting that the site 'is being modified to comply with President Trump's Executive Orders.' Them has reached out to NIH officials for comment.
ATN, a network of numerous HIV research programs focused on improving medical care and outcomes for young people, has enrolled more than 30,000 young people in HIV care and prevention studies since it was founded in 2001. The network has previously worked with groups like The CHANGE Agenda and the International AIDS Society to distribute information and increase access to healthcare, especially among LGBTQ+ youth. Its past initiatives have included the community-based 'Connect2Protect' prevention program to reduce the likelihood of HIV exposure among boys and young men.
CDC Orders Retraction of Research So Papers Can Be Reviewed for 'Transgender' and Other 'Forbidden Terms'
The sweeping order came from the CDC's chief science officer last week.
An anonymous state health department worker also told the Post on Tuesday that public health workers using the National Violent Death Reporting System — a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) program that collects data about violent deaths in the U.S., including cases of suicide, for research purposes — are now unable to identify victims as transgender. 'We already have issues getting accurate data about trans individuals, and to me, this is just a complete erasure of an already vulnerable population,' the anonymous worker told the Post.
These crackdowns on trans-related public health research are part of Trump's much larger vendetta against trans identities, which he has labeled 'gender ideology,' at the federal level. On January 31 — the same day the NIH Zoom call allegedly took place — CDC officials ordered the agency's scientists to withdraw all papers currently being considered for publication, in order to determine whether any contained 'forbidden terms' such as 'gender,' 'transgender,' 'LGBT,' or 'nonbinary.' CDC scientists whose names appear as co-authors on papers originating outside the agency were also directed to remove their names entirely from those papers.
In an editorial for Science magazine this week, writer and medicinal chemist Derek Lowe called the Trump administration's actions 'flagrantly lawless' and 'a vindictive ideological assault on agencies that [...] have helped produce major scientific advances in more fields than I can name.'
'[W]hat we're seeing at the NIH and [National Science Foundation] is Dealing With Them, in real time: whacking the organizations hard to terrify everyone involved and making it clear that they are not wanted and should leave,' Lowe added.
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