Senator Marco Rubio is calling out the National Institute of Health (NIH) for “pushing President Biden’s progressive agenda.”
This encompasses the rejection of grantee candidates that do not “prioritize Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in their research,” as well as “promoting sex-changing surgery and puberty blockers as ‘safe and effective’ despite the proven social, psychological, and physical harms of these treatments.”
In order to address these concerns, Sen. Rubio wrote a letter to NIH Acting Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak in regard to “the misguiding priorities of the agency.”
“[A recent piece] analyzed two NIH-funded programs in South Carolina and New Mexico. The results showed that candidates who emphasized ‘treat[ing] everyone the same’ and race neutrality received lower scores on evaluations of a candidate’s contribution to DEI” stated Sen. Rubio.
He would also go on to mention that the NIH has curried favor for the Biden administration’s “woke rhetoric.”
“NIH has completely catered to the administration’s woke rhetoric instead of the science of so called ‘gender-affirming care.’ In an attempt to further the agenda that sex changing surgeries and puberty blockers are ‘safe’ and ‘effective,’ the NIH is funding projects that are harming patients, and then considering the study a success,” said Rubio.
The Florida Senator brought up the fact that the NIH has not funded projects based on necessity, but rather on things such as gender-affirming care.
“The NIH should be expected to fund project proposals based on the need, relevance, and impact of the research. Only 19.1 percent of research project grants were funded by the NIH in 2021.7 Instead, the agency is choosing to support deadly and irreversibly harmful procedures on Americans to signal to Biden’s base that they care about these issues. Though we are on the cusp of breakthroughs for multiple medical conditions impacting the daily lives of millions of Americans, the NIH has decided to allocate its resources towards woke ‘science,’” wrote Rubio.
For the full text of the letter, click here.
