Latest news with #PSNet
Boston Globe
24-05-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
Federal judge gives Trump administration 7 days to restore LGBTQ+ research by two Harvard doctors to website
The works ordered to be restored are a commentary on suicide risk by Dr. Gordon Schiff, director of quality and safety at the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care, and a piece on endometriosis by 'The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims under the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act,' US District Judge Leo T. Sorokin wrote in his two-page order allowing the requested preliminary injunction. Advertisement 'They have suffered irreparable harm and will continue to suffer it in the absence of relief, the balance of harms tips decisively in their favor, and the public interest favors an injunction,' Sorokin wrote. A hearing on the matter has been scheduled for Wednesday in federal court in Boston. 'Our clients were faced with an impossible choice: remove their patient safety research from PSNet entirely or change the words and messages to fit what this administration agrees with,' Rachel Davidson, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said in a statement. Advertisement 'Republishing their articles is a victory for free speech and public health,' Davidson added. 'The government can't censor medical research solely because it disfavors certain viewpoints.' The physicians who brought the lawsuit forward applauded the judge's order. 'We are very gratified and encouraged by this affirmation of the First Amendment, academic freedom, and the illegality of the actions by the Trump administration in attempting to censor and take down our peer-reviewed patient safety articles,' Schiff's statement said. 'We hope it gives others in the educational, research, and medical communities the courage to not be intimidated in resisting these unacceptable actions by the Trump administration that, unopposed, will cost many thousands of lives,' Schiff continued. 'While re-posting of our articles to PSNet will reverse small, but important injustices, the larger attacks on public health and patient safety and health care access must also be resisted and reversed.' Royce said she was grateful for the opportunity 'to stand up for not just our rights, but those of other physicians, scientists, researchers, students, and all those who have been illegally silenced or engaged in self-censorship out of fear of this administration and the dismantling of our government and our democracy.' 'As an educator and a physician, I will continue to fight misinformation and falsehoods put out by the administration, and I will continue to advocate for the rights of my patients and my students,' Royce said. 'I hope our victory today will inspire others to continue to fight against all the injustices happening, and fight for the civil and human rights of the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and all the communities this administration is trying to silence and suppress.' Advertisement Tonya Alanez can be reached at
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Trump administration must restore health articles scrubbed for transgender mentions, judge rules
By Nate Raymond BOSTON (Reuters) -A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to restore articles by doctors and medical researchers that were removed from a government-run website focused on patient safety because they contained references to transgender people. U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston sided with two doctors at Harvard Medical School whose patient-safety articles were scrubbed from the website after Republican President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring agencies to remove all statements and policies promoting "gender ideology." The articles had been published on the Patient Safety Network (PSNet), an online patient safety resource. It is run by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The judge agreed with the doctors that the removal of the articles was a "textbook example" of viewpoint discrimination that violated the free speech protections of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. "This is a flagrant violation of the plaintiffs' First Amendment rights as private speakers on a limited public forum," the judge, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, wrote. Sorokin ordered the administration to restore not just the two doctors' articles to the PSNet but all other content authored by private parties that were removed from the website pursuant to Trump's executive order following a word search for items that contained certain terms. Rachel Davidson, a lawyer for Drs. Gordon Schiff and Celeste Royce at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, in a statement called the ruling "a victory for free speech and public health." HHS did not respond to a request for comment. Trump signed the executive order on his first day back in the White House on January 20, forcing the government to "recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male." Among the articles that were removed from PSNet were ones co-authored by Schiff and Royce, who sued after articles they co-wrote focused on suicide risk and the disease endometriosis were removed because they included brief references acknowledging transgender patient populations. Sorokin said even passing references to people who identify themselves as transgender were deemed contrary to Trump's order, and deleting the offending words was a non-negotiable prerequisite for the articles to be reposted to PSNet.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Trump administration must restore health articles scrubbed for transgender mentions, judge rules
By Nate Raymond BOSTON (Reuters) -A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to restore articles by doctors and medical researchers that were removed from a government-run website focused on patient safety because they contained references to transgender people. U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston sided with two doctors at Harvard Medical School whose patient-safety articles were scrubbed from the website after Republican President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring agencies to remove all statements and policies promoting "gender ideology." The articles had been published on the Patient Safety Network (PSNet), an online patient safety resource. It is run by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The judge agreed with the doctors that the removal of the articles was a "textbook example" of viewpoint discrimination that violated the free speech protections of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. "This is a flagrant violation of the plaintiffs' First Amendment rights as private speakers on a limited public forum," the judge, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, wrote. Sorokin ordered the administration to restore not just the two doctors' articles to the PSNet but all other content authored by private parties that were removed from the website pursuant to Trump's executive order following a word search for items that contained certain terms. Rachel Davidson, a lawyer for Drs. Gordon Schiff and Celeste Royce at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, in a statement called the ruling "a victory for free speech and public health." HHS did not respond to a request for comment. Trump signed the executive order on his first day back in the White House on January 20, forcing the government to "recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male." Among the articles that were removed from PSNet were ones co-authored by Schiff and Royce, who sued after articles they co-wrote focused on suicide risk and the disease endometriosis were removed because they included brief references acknowledging transgender patient populations. Sorokin said even passing references to people who identify themselves as transgender were deemed contrary to Trump's order, and deleting the offending words was a non-negotiable prerequisite for the articles to be reposted to PSNet.
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Harvard doctors sue Trump administration over censoring LGBTQ+ terms
Two doctors and professors from Harvard Medical School are suing the Trump Administration over the removal of two research articles from a government website because they included the words 'LGBTQ' and 'trans(gender).' The two doctors describe the move as censorship and say it is antithetical to their mission as health care providers and could harm the transgender community. Keep up with the latest in + news and politics. The plaintiffs, Gordon Schiff and Celeste Royce are described in the lawsuit as 'two doctors and Harvard Medical School professors who refused to censor their medical conclusions to bend to this political fiat,' adding they filed the suit 'to defend the integrity of medical research and the safety of patients from the government's dangerous, arbitrary, and unconstitutional censorship.' They sued over the removal of two articles from the government-run Patient Safety Network (PSNet). 'Endometriosis: A Common and Commonly Missed and Delayed Diagnosis' was co-authored by Royce, and 'Multiple Missed Opportunities for Suicide Risk Assessment in Emergency and Primary Care Settings' was co-authored by Schiff. Both articles contained a sentence referencing the transgender, gender-nonconforming, or LGBTQ+ community. PSNet is run by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). According to the lawsuit, Schiff received an email from Patrick Romano, a co-editor of PSNet, saying the articles were being removed from the site in response to an email directive from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) ordering the removal of any content that might be in non-compliance with the White House's executive order on gender identity. Romano provided further explanation of the decision in a follow-up email to the Editor-in-Chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. 'Per this memo, AHRQ staff were given until 5pm ET Friday to 'Take down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts etc.) that promote or inculcate gender ideology.'' Romano wrote. 'Based on guidance provided to AHRQ staff, this instruction from OPM was interpreted to include anything with the words 'transgender,' 'nonbinary,' or 'gender identity.' The phrase 'LGBTQ' is problematic because it includes that letter T for 'transgender.' The doctors are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School. 'Good doctors serve and advocate for their patients, whoever they are,' Royce said in a statement. 'We cannot uphold an oath to Do No Harm if our training and research are politicized.' 'This type of wholesale, non-evidence-based removal endangers everyone's safety,' Schiff said in a 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.' 'Our clients were given an impossible choice between removing their article from PSNet entirely or censoring parts of it,' Rachel Davidson, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement. 'This is an intentional erasure of knowledge, an attack on the integrity of scientific research, and an affront to the public's need for accurate, adequate health information.' The suit argues that the government violated the First Amendment free speech rights of the doctors and the Administrative Procedure Act for removing articles without cause. The OPM, AHRQ, and HHS are named as defendants in the suit.
Boston Globe
12-03-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
‘An assault on science:' Harvard researchers sue Trump administration for erasing their work.
The lawsuit comes amid a torrent of actions from the Trump administration to Advertisement Researchers in Massachusetts are particularly vulnerable. The state ranks sixth for per capita federal funding of diversity and equity-oriented research, according to a Globe analysis of federal data. In 2024, the state received $33.1 million for such research, up from $23.2 million in fiscal year 2020. Among the papers removed from PSNet, the patient safety network, was one on suicide risk. According to the law suit, it was taken down because it included a sentence about heightened risk in LGBTQ communities. The other was about endometriosis, an often-painful condition Advertisement That paper was from 2020, which was why Three days later a follow-up email from the editor, who is a government contractor, explained that the 5-year-old article ran afoul of Trump's executive orders. 'When a paper that is specifically intended to address misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis is taken down because of a phrase that this diagnosis should be considered in all people, including trans and gender non- conforming people, you're limiting the way that people might think about approaching diagnosis,' Royce said. 'It's the idea that we're preventing people from thinking or limiting the way that they think, and how is that going to affect the next generation of physicians, or the current generation of physicians who are out there practicing right now,' she said. The other paper was by Dr. Gordon Schiff,director of quality and safety at the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care. Like Royce's paper, Schiff's was not focused on gender or equity issues, but noted in a single sentence that LGBTQ people are at higher risk of suicide. 'Suicide is a huge public health issue, which you don't deal with by suppressing science or discouraging people from writing about it,' Schiff said in a Globe interview last month. 'People are going to die as a result of censorship like this.' The lawsuit asks the court to declare the government's actions of removing or altering from its public websites and social media accounts speech that promotes 'gender ideology' by private individuals unconstitutional and unlawful. And it asks that the government be barred from taking such actions in the future. Advertisement It also asks that PSNet, the government's patient safety network, be ordered to restore all articles and information related to LGBTQ and non-binary individuals it removed after Trump was inaugurated. Lawyers at ACLU believe there may be at least 20 other articles out of a database of more than 18,000 that were removed from the PSNet site for similar reasons, but they are still trying to identify those papers and authors and may eventually include them in the suit. Davidson, the ACLU lawyer, said removing articles that even hint at LGBTQ concerns will hurt everyone. 'We' that it's spilling out into all of society, and the harms are going to be really widespread if we're removing scientific literature wholesale from public websites,' Davidson said. 'The implications are going to be potentially really broad. And I think it's terrifying.' Compared to the hundreds, if not thousands, of researchers across the country whose work and government funding are in the Trump administration's crosshairs, the articles pulled from PSNet are a 'tiny tiny drop,' Royce said. 'But I feel like, if we don't fight back for our fundamental rights, we'll lose them and whatever I can do to contribute to that, I want to do,' she said. 'I want to stand up for people's rights.' Material from previous Globe articles was used in this story. Kay Lazar can be reached at
