Latest news with #ArielBeccia
Boston Globe
01-04-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
‘We are all terrified': Mass General Brigham to lose millions in medical research grants under Trump cuts
The latest cuts will affect research programs awarded at least $70 million at MGB hospitals' labs over multiple years, with most of that money already paid but at least $18 million still untapped, a federal Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Related : Advertisement Far more devastating cuts could loom. On Monday, the Trump administration Advertisement While research-funding agencies offered only vague reasons for the cuts, some terminated studies focused on the COVID pandemic or on LGBTQ or transgender health issues, subjects of partisan rancor in the Trump era. It also wasn't clear whether grant applications are being penalized for stating how they will include women and minorities in their programs, information required by a law passed 'We've been hit by a wave,' said Dr. Duane Wesemann, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and associate physician at Brigham and Women's, who got word last week that the NIH canceled funds for the last two years of a five-year, $10 million flagship program he headed on pandemic readiness. 'The impact is devastating.' A spokesperson for NIH released a statement Monday saying the agency 'is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and [Department of Health and Human Services] priorities.' The statement didn't address how NIH decided to terminate programs. 'We remain dedicated to restoring our agency to its tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science,' it said. Related : Researchers at some MGB labs fear the cuts have only begun. 'We are all terrified,' said Dr. Bruce Fischl, professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School who Millions of more dollars have been cut from funding at other Massachusetts research universities and hospitals, including the University of Massachusetts' Chan Medical School, Boston Children's Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Boston Medical Center. Many of those research labs are appealing the NIH funding cuts, but in the meantime, their money has stopped coming in. Advertisement Boston Children's has had five grants terminated, totaling $11.3 million. One was for a program studying how the COVID pandemic affected mental health among LGBTQ people. In its termination note, NIH said the award 'no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.' 'I was shocked and devastated,' said Ariel Beccia, principal investigator on the mental health study and an instructor at the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 'If this continues, we are going to lose a generation of scientists.' "If this continues, we are going to lose a generation of scientists," said Ariel Beccia, an instructor at the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who has had her NIH funding terminated. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff Wesemann's lab was exploring the viability of a vaccine that could fight all coronaviruses, not just COVID-19. At another Brigham and Women's lab run by principal investigator Dr. Abraam Yakoub, the team was studying the root causes of 'long COVID,' including neurological problems lasting long after the infection appears to pass. Both labs received letters from NIH saying their funding was no longer needed because 'the [COVID] pandemic is over.' In an appeal, Wesemann argued that his research was meant to study the immune system to develop a vaccine that could protect people against a future coronavirus pandemic, not specifically for COVID. 'COVID won't be the last coronavirus to go into humans,' he said. 'There's a continued worry about other coronaviruses and other viruses that will jump into humans and cause havoc. I said, 'The whole point of this research is that the questions have not been answered.'' Related : Yakoub, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's, took issue with the NIH assertion that the pandemic is over, noting that COVID Advertisement 'To us, as scientists who have dedicated their lifetime to research, each of these research projects is like our very own babies,' he said. 'Each big discovery we make is five or more years of our lifetime. This is my life's mission and what I live for — to understand why disease happens and/or find ways to treat it.' For the past century, money from agencies such as the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been the lifeblood of medical research, bankrolling the basic discoveries that underpin lifesaving therapies such as vaccines and cancer drugs. Related : While funding levels have ebbed and flowed in the past, the Trump administration cuts are 'entirely unprecedented and vicious beyond any precedent,' said Don Berwick, the former administrator of the Berwick said Massachusetts labs are being disproportionately hurt because the state has 'been not just a national, but an international leader in biomedical research for decades.' The full impact of the cuts on Mass General Brigham, which drew more than $655 million in NIH funding at Mass. General and more than $388 million at Brigham and Women's last year, wasn't clear. In a recent federal document, NIH only listed as terminated about seven grants to the hospitals, though researchers say there are far more canceled awards not yet reflected on the document. Most are for multiyear research programs in which some or most of the funding was already paid. Some were in collaboration with other hospitals that drew part of the funding. Advertisement Ellie Dehoney, senior vice president of policy and advocacy at the nonpartisan alliance 'Those are the last grants you want to see terminated,' she said. 'That is throwing good money away. That's not something anyone wants to see.' Data from outside researchers tracking funding cuts nationally suggest their economic impact is already being felt. Federal cuts have Related : NIH grant cuts have come in waves since late February and appear to be broadening with each passing week. Initially, they were focused on projects related to the health of transgender and LGBTQ people. More recently, NIH is canceling scores of studies related to COVID-19. Alan Sager, a Boston University professor of health law, policy, and management, said he has been surprised by the 'lack of public uproar' over the NIH rollbacks. The cuts 'don't appear to be backed by an overriding goal,' he said. 'It feels like policy by muscle spasm.' Robert Weisman can be reached at
WIRED
21-03-2025
- Health
- WIRED
Researchers Rush to Save US Government Data on Trans Youth—Before It Disappears
Mar 21, 2025 5:30 AM In the face of the Trump administration's anti-trans efforts, researchers and volunteers around the world are backing up federally-funded studies, and vowing to keep the resources online. On a Friday afternoon in mid-March, a bunch of (presumably) non-hackers showed up to participate in a new kind of 'hackathon.' It was Pi Day, so pie was served, but the mood wasn't celebratory. Students, researchers, and members of the wider public health community were there, in a lecture hall at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and on Zoom, to rescue data. Whatever they could. According to the flier for the Preserving Public Health Data Hackathon, the current Trump administration was trying to undermine research on everything from climate change to systemic racism, and saving data from government websites meant it would be archived and republished in the event federal agencies tried to remove it. The antiauthoritarian theme came up often: don't obey in advance. Everyone in the room and on the Zoom got a crash course in identifying at-risk information, collecting it, and storing it once they did. Backing up certain pieces seemed critical. For those who work in public health, protecting research pertaining to gender identity and diversity issues has been a focus since the inauguration. Last year, then-candidate Trump repeated a lot of anti-trans rhetoric on the campaign trail, and in the first weeks of his presidency signed executive orders essentially barring transgender people from serving in the military, proclaiming that the US government would only recognize 'two genders, male and female,' threatening to withhold federal funds in what is an attempt to bar trans women from sports, and attempting to block gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19. Since Trump's inauguration, hundreds of words—from 'transgender' to 'Latinx' to 'accessible'—have been removed from federal agencies' websites. In early February, thousands of websites went missing as agencies raced to comply with the executive orders. In recent weeks, the targeting of gender-related material has become even starker, after Trump told a joint session of Congress that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had uncovered that the federal government had spent $8 million on 'making mice transgender' (it hasn't), and the Department of Defense performed a purge of 'DEI' materials that included flagging, but ultimately not removing, images of the Enola Gay. One particular dataset, the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (commonly shortened to YRBS), seems particularly at-risk, notes Ariel Beccia, an epidemiologist at the Chan School's LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence. The YRBS, which tracks scores of health-related issues in young people, is one of the only nationally representative surveys that regularly collects data on transgender kids. Beccia and other public health researchers fear the information in the YRBS may not be available forever. And even if the YRBS can be backed up, the integrity of its data can't be completely protected from the influence of the new administration. President Trump's recent moves have also left some in public service afraid to participate in new research, like this year's survey. 'Because of this 'comply in advance' strategy, school boards are hesitant to participate in the YRBS,' Beccia told attendees at the hackathon. Beccia would know. Her research focuses on race and ethnicity as well as LGBTQ+ young people. She's recently been looking into LGTBQ+ inequities in eating disorders. Her work relies on YRBS data. Now that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which hosts the survey's results, has reportedly stopped processing data on trans Americans, and fewer schools are participating, the data Beccia uses, even if it stays online, will be incomplete. When asked about this, CDC spokesperson Melissa Dibble confirmed that, in compliance with Trump's executive orders, 'the transgender identity question was removed from the national Youth Risk Behavior Survey,' but no other changes were made. Dibble added that the change shouldn't delay the survey's results. It's created a 'double whammy' situation, Beccia says, where government employees are trying to comply with Trump's executive orders and school districts are afraid to participate in any study related to gender or LGBTQ+ health, even if it is data that in turn guides how they run their schools. 'We are living through a pretty scary time with the administration,' Beccia tells me a few days after the event. 'This is obviously impacting the mental health of everyone in the country, especially queer and trans people and queer and trans youth, and we're not going to have data on this.' The YRBS is just one of many datasets researchers have sought to shore up in a long-running effort to preserve government-funded information as the new administration takes control. The University of Washington Information School held 'Data Rescue' events in January aimed at collecting climate crisis information. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), a network of research professionals that launched a tool during Trump's first term to track changes to environmental information on federal websites, relaunched that tracker at the beginning of March. The Data Rescue Project, a consortium of data-rescue organizations, lists dozens of ways people can get involved if they want to help collect. A group of archivists has recreated the pre-Inauguration Day version of the CDC website and is now hosting it in Europe at Other organizations are also looking to back up the YRBS, too. On January 30, soon after Trump signed the first of his executive orders aimed at trans Americans, Libby Hemphill, director of the Resource Center for Minority Data at The Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research (ICPSR), started getting calls. Word had gotten out that the CDC might be scrubbing data, including the YRBS, and people wanted to know how to stop it. Hemphill gathered some colleagues and started scraping it. Then there were requests for data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), from the Department of Education, from the National Institutes of Health. Much like the data-preservation effort at the Chan School, Hemphill and her team coordinated ways for people to submit data they wanted to preserve and ways for researchers to collect it and store it. The ICPSR runs a repository known as DataLumos, where a lot of the preservation efforts are backing up their collections. When I ask Hemphill if she's worried about the safety of the information in the DataLumos archive, she says 'it's absolutely something that we think about,' adding, 'I can assure you that ICPSR has a non-US physical, non-US regulatory plan for data preservation.' If you think this sounds familiar, you're not wrong. When Trump assumed the presidency in 2017, scientists, archivists, and librarians at the University of Pennsylvania raced to save data published by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and NOAA. Another group in Michigan, also fearing the EPA and NOAA websites would lose valuable information, made a similar move. Websites were backed up to the Internet Archive; large datasets were 'bagged' for safe keeping. At the time, the researchers weren't sure the incoming administration would seek to erase any info. It was more like a hunch, one that proved prescient when, then being led by Trump appointee and agency administrator Scott Pruitt, the EPA began removing climate change information from its website in April 2017, 'to reflect the approach of new leadership.' Between 2017 and 2021, more than 1,400 pages related to climate change on government web sites were altered or made less accessible, according to data compiled by the EDGI. That, notes Gretchen Gehrke, who leads EDGI's website monitoring program, is not 'a comprehensive list of changes,' since some alterations—like removing 'Climate Change' from the navigation page of get counted once but affect several other pages. 'I think there is a lot more awareness about the precarity of federal information after having experienced the first Trump administration,' Gehrke says. 'Watching the Trump campaign become truly obsessed with trans people, and knowing the Trump administration's history of information suppression, people were and are rightly concerned that that information is at risk.' Which is why Beccia is concerned. Datasets like those in the YRBS are few and far between and losing it could be disastrous to those wanting to know about the health and well-being of trans youth in America. Although the YRBS is currently live on the CDC's website, it did briefly disappear, along with data on the Food and Drug Administration and Department of Health and Human Services web sites, earlier this year following an order from the Office of Personnel Management that it be scrubbed to comply with Trump's executive orders. The information returned in mid-February when US District Judge John Bates, responding to a lawsuit from Doctors for America, granted a temporary restraining order and the site was reinstated. A disclaimer at the top of the YRBS page now says 'any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate,' adding 'this page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the administration and this department rejects it.' Tazlina Mannix worked for the YRBS program in Alaska from 2015 until 2023, both as survey coordinator and data manager. She notes that even if the CDC keeps the data online, disclaimers like the one on the site now make it harder for researchers to do their work. Collecting public health data relies on relationships with people in health departments and school districts. Giving those people any reason to hesitate can 'set you back to zero,' she says. 'When I first saw [that disclaimer], I was so horrified. The language is so extreme, and it's also just wrong.'
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Trump administration erases mention of climate change and LGBT+ health data from key government sites
Just under two weeks into the Trump administration, government agencies are making major edits to the content shared on their website to fit with the president's policies. Several pages were taken down from the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention related to health disparities among LGBT+ youth. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which manages the U.S. Forest Service, has removed pages related to climate change. 'You are not authorized to access this page,' the USDA website reads. 'The page you're looking for was not found,' the CDC says. In a copy of the Department of Agriculture guidance shared with The Independent, employees were asked to review websites for climate content and unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change, identify all web content related to climate change, and document it in a spreadsheet for later review. ABC News said it had obtained the spreadsheet. Using the WayBackMachine, the Department of Agriculture pages feature climate change science and effects, adaptation, information about the USDA's Greenhouse Gas Inventory and Assessment Program. The site also offered a link to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the U.S. Government's preeminent report on climate change impacts, risks, and responses. Notably, information about climate change and its impact on agriculture still remains on the Environmental Protection Agency website. The now-missing CDC pages discuss how LGBT+ youth are 'at risk for negative health outcomes' and how to support them. 'Many LGBTQ+ youth thrive during adolescence. But stigma, discrimination, and other factors put them at increased risk for negative health and life outcomes,' the CDC resource used to say. 'Stigma comes in many forms, such as discrimination, harassment, family disapproval, social rejection, and violence. This puts LGBTQ+ youth at increased risk for certain negative health outcomes.' Neither the CDC nor the USDA immediately replied to The Independent's requests for comment on the matter. 'Everyone I know in public health and science ... is freaking out right now,' Ariel Beccia, a researcher and instructor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health focused on eating disorders in LGBT+ populations, told STAT News. The moves come amid a bid to oust all transgender troops from the military as well as a push away from clean energy initiatives to follow Trump's 'drill, baby, drill,' campaign pitch. Trump has said climate change is a 'scam' and a 'hoax,' and moved to withdraw the nation from the international Paris climate agreement. The pact aims to reduce warming from climate change, and prevent expected consequences like worsening drought and more powerful storms. Brooke Rollins, his pick for USDA secretary, has denied that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Trump administration erases mention of climate change and LGBT+ health data from key government sites
Just under two weeks into the Trump administration, government agencies are making major edits to the content shared on their website to fit with the president's policies. Several pages were taken down from the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention related to health disparities among LGBT+ youth. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which manages the U.S. Forest Service, has removed pages related to climate change. 'You are not authorized to access this page,' the USDA website reads. 'The page you're looking for was not found,' the CDC says. Notably, information about climate change and its impact on agriculture still remains on the Environmental Protection Agency website. Using the WayBackMachine, the Department of Agriculture pages feature climate change science and effects, adaptation, information about the USDA's Greenhouse Gas Inventory and Assessment Program. The site also offered a link to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the U.S. Government's preeminent report on climate change impacts, risks, and responses. The now-missing CDC pages discuss how LGBT+ youth are 'at risk for negative health outcomes' and how to support them. 'Many LGBTQ+ youth thrive during adolescence. But stigma, discrimination, and other factors put them at increased risk for negative health and life outcomes,' the CDC resource used to say. 'Stigma comes in many forms, such as discrimination, harassment, family disapproval, social rejection, and violence. This puts LGBTQ+ youth at increased risk for certain negative health outcomes.' 'Everyone I know in public health and science ... is freaking out right now,' Ariel Beccia, a researcher and instructor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health focused on eating disorders in LGBT+ populations, told STAT News. The moves come amid a bid to oust all transgender troops from the military as well as a push away from clean energy initiatives to follow Trump's 'drill, baby, drill,' campaign pitch. Trump has said climate change is a 'scam' and a 'hoax,' and moved to withdraw the nation from the international Paris climate agreement. The pact aims to reduce warming from climate change, and prevent expected consequences like worsening drought and more powerful storms. Brooke Rollins, his pick for USDA secretary, has denied that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. A Friday report from Politico, citing an internal email, said that employees at the USDA had been ordered to delete landing pages discussing climate change across agency websites. They were instructed that all climate change-related information should be identified and documented 'in a spreadsheet' for review. ABC News also said it had obtained the spreadsheet. Neither the CDC nor the USDA immediately replied to The Independent's requests for comment on the matter.
The Independent
31-01-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Trump administration erases mention of climate change and LGBT+ health data from key government sites
Just under two weeks into the Trump administration, government agencies are making major edits to the content shared on their website to fit with the president's policies. Several pages were taken down from the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention related to health disparities among LGBT+ youth. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which manages the U.S. Forest Service, has removed pages related to climate change. 'You are not authorized to access this page,' the USDA website reads. 'The page you're looking for was not found,' the CDC says. Notably, information about climate change and its impact on agriculture still remains on the Environmental Protection Agency website. Using the WayBackMachine, the Department of Agriculture pages feature climate change science and effects, adaptation, information about the USDA's Greenhouse Gas Inventory and Assessment Program. The site also offered a link to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the U.S. Government's preeminent report on climate change impacts, risks, and responses. The now-missing CDC pages discuss how LGBT+ youth are 'at risk for negative health outcomes' and how to support them. 'Many LGBTQ+ youth thrive during adolescence. But stigma, discrimination, and other factors put them at increased risk for negative health and life outcomes,' the CDC resource used to say. 'Stigma comes in many forms, such as discrimination, harassment, family disapproval, social rejection, and violence. This puts LGBTQ+ youth at increased risk for certain negative health outcomes.' 'Everyone I know in public health and science ... is freaking out right now,' Ariel Beccia, a researcher and instructor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health focused on eating disorders in LGBT+ populations, told STAT News. The moves come amid a bid to oust all transgender troops from the military as well as a push away from clean energy initiatives to follow Trump's 'drill, baby, drill,' campaign pitch. Trump has said climate change is a 'scam' and a 'hoax,' and moved to withdraw the nation from the international Paris climate agreement. The pact aims to reduce warming from climate change, and prevent expected consequences like worsening drought and more powerful storms. Brooke Rollins, his pick for USDA secretary, has denied that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. A Friday report from Politico, citing an internal email, said that employees at the USDA had been ordered to delete landing pages discussing climate change across agency websites. They were instructed that all climate change-related information should be identified and documented 'in a spreadsheet' for review. ABC News also said it had obtained the spreadsheet.
