How the Trump administration is impacting the First Amendment rights of scientists
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
It was 6 p.m. on a Friday when Tara McKay saw an email from the branch of the National Institutes of Health. It read...
TARA MCKAY: Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.
FADEL: McKay leads Vanderbilt's LGBTQ+ Policy Lab, and she's spent her career studying health disparities in these communities. But her federal funding, she'd been informed, was terminated.
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MCKAY: I do feel like the negative pieces of this letter - the unscientific thing, that your work doesn't benefit the American people - were, you know, included to be mean and to intimidate me into not doing this work. But I'm going to keep doing it anyway and show that it is scientific, and it does benefit Americans.
FADEL: That email came in February. As of today, she says her lab has lost $10 million in federal funding, and her story is one of so many. The Department of Health and Human Services, which includes NIH, has terminated over 1,000 grants. And the Trump administration has threatened hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to universities dedicated to biomedical and other scientific research. The nation's top scientists are calling it a wholesale assault on U.S. science. Today, on The State of the First Amendment: The Right from Which All Rights Flow, is the Trump administration using federal funds and executive orders to silence the work of scientists?
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FADEL: McKay is technically free to continue her research. But without access to federal data and money, it'll be almost impossible. And she says that may be the point.
MCKAY: I don't feel like someone saying, oh, Tara, you cannot say, like, queer people matter, but more that I can't make the case because those data aren't going to be able to exist. That feels very challenging in terms of really, really valuing free speech because then it puts whatever I have to say in the opinion bucket, as opposed to the science bucket.
FADEL: Now, Alina Chan says before this administration came to power, not all scientific theories were respected and supported. She learned this during the pandemic, as the world was shutting down and public health officials were trying to understand the origins and nature of COVID-19.
ALINA CHAN: In early 2020, I said that both natural and lab-based hypothesis for the origin of COVID-19 were plausible and had to be considered no matter how likely or unlikely.
FADEL: The molecular biologist, who works at MIT's Broad Institute, faced immediate backlash for suggesting the scientific community needed to consider the virus might have leaked from a lab in China.
CHAN: Some of the leading scientists, they reached out to my employer. They wanted to get me disciplined or fired. I received lots of threats online. The amount of degradation coming from some virologists, it continues even today.
FADEL: She was called a race traitor, a conspiracist, a right-wing anti-vaxxer.
CHAN: So in terms of freedom, I was, of course, free. But it didn't protect me from the kind of online harassment, intimidation and even, I think, professional interference that resulted from me speaking up on this topic.
FADEL: In the time since, some federal agencies have shifted their positions to favor the accidental lab leak, though much of the scientific community continues to believe the natural origin hypothesis is more likely. Chan says she was shocked by the efforts to shut her speech down when she pushed for the scientific community to consider all possibilities.
CHAN: When that happens, it makes it really difficult for other scientists to speak up, to point out where the consensus might be wrong. So because of this rigidity in science right now where everyone is sort of, like, closing ranks, it's really hard for there to be true freedom of speech.
FADEL: Today, she says, she thinks the backlash against the scientific community from this administration stems in part from that time. As scientists tried to understand the virus and public health officials kept changing guidance, as a frustrated population was dealing with masking mandates and school closures...
CHAN: That trust faded. That glorification of science did start to wear off at the end of the Biden administration. And so now you have this new administration, and they have frequently been portrayed as anti-science racists, liars. And now they come in, and what do they do with the scientists, right? So obviously, there isn't a good relationship there. And obviously, this whole scientific enterprise is in trouble.
FADEL: While Democrats and a lot of the scientific community dismissed the theory at the time, Chan's silencing, the efforts to censor her were not orchestrated and led by the U.S. government. And almost 2,000 of the nation's top scientists say that's what they think is happening now. They wrote this open letter to the American people.
ANA DIEZ ROUX: The quest for truth, the mission of science, requires that scientists freely explore new questions and report their findings honestly, independent of special interests. The administration is engaging in censorship, destroying this independence.
FADEL: Reading the letter is one of its coauthors, Dr. Ana Diez Roux, an epidemiologist at Drexel University.
DIEZ ROUX: A climate of fear has descended on the research community.
FADEL: I asked her why they sounded this SOS warning, as they called it.
DIEZ ROUX: We really felt that we had a moral obligation as scientists to speak out and express what we were seeing so that we can hopefully change course. There are research studies that have been terminated. These studies include clinical trials that are ongoing that have implications for the treatments that people will receive. They also include studies to help us prevent the transmission of infectious diseases and prepare for the next pandemic.
FADEL: Here at MORNING EDITION, we've been asking a lot about the state of free speech. And as you just read that letter, there was one line that stood out to me. Quote, "the administration is engaging in censorship." Can you say more about what you mean by censorship?
DIEZ ROUX: One of the things that's been happening, in addition to the arbitrary and sudden termination of a variety of research projects and the firing and resignation of scientists, there has been an explicit or implicit targeting of certain areas of research that are perceived to be counter to the ideology of the current administration. And this is a big problem because science is about exploration, but we can't do that. We can't provide that kind of objective information that can then be considered by others for social action. We can't do that if certain areas are deemed off-limits.
FADEL: Fear, they say, now permeates their community.
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FADEL: We asked the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health and the White House to respond to this open letter and the specific accusations made by these scientists. The White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly responded saying Trump, quote, "will continue to fight against censorship while evaluating all federal spending to identify waste, fraud and abuse."
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