Trump threatens Australian medical research

Tonight, NBC News has obtained a memo ordering that all references to quote gender ideology be removed across the federal government. The deadline was about an hour and twenty minutes ago at five pm Eastern Time, and.

The CDC is cutting off all communications with the World Health Organization effective immediately. The movers to comply with the executive order President Trump signed last week withdrawing the US from the WHO.

The CDC website on youth LGBTQ mental health was up and running January twenty third, but if you look today you get a message that reads the page you're looking for was not found.

Right now, there's a note to the top of all web pages for the US Centers for Disease Control. It says this website is being modified to comply with President Trump's executive orders. Thousands of pages across US government websites were also taken offline as they were scrubbed for mention of gender, race, sexual orientation, and other terms the Trump administration have banned. And this is just the start of

It's chaos, I think is probably the only word I can think of. So the Centers for Disease Control, it's the leading national science based organization for public health. So its job is to track disease outbreaks, to collect data, to.

Analyze that data, to look at the who, what, why, how, all.

Of that of any diseases, and they look at not just what's happening within the US, but beyond its borders.

So globally. It's particularly important at the moment because.

We've got bird flu or H five N one in birds, which in the US has also spread into dairy cattle, into cats, into foxes, and into humans. And at the moment, it's not spreading between humans, but it's an evolving situation, and it's a situation that has global implications. So a whole heap of that data is being pulled off the CDC website. They've been hit with the communications blackout, so no public communications, no public speaking coming out of any

The CDC at thea.

That extends to all of their publications, and the most important of which is called the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

According to a copy of the data obtained by The New York Times, the CDC pulled a part of the report that said some cases of bird flu had infected cats that in turn infected humans.

Scientists are banned from traveling, so they're not able to attend meetings, meet with collaborators.

It's just, I mean, it's extraordinary.

This is a resource that, particularly during the pandemic, so many people around the world relied on, from journalists to doctors to politicians, and it's just it's vanishing in front of our eyes, Like it's inconceivable how much of a resource that is and how devastating its loss is going to be.

And the CDC is not the only body in the US affected. What else is happening?

Yeah, I mean, we've seen the attack on transgender healthcare. We sort of knew that this was coming, but I think it's still so deeply shocking to see an executive order from the Presidential Office issued the day he was sworn in, which was about defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truths to the federal government. It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.

Agency programs, contracts, and grants and terminate any that promote or inculcate gender ideology.

Key resources for health care providers are gone. Information about gay and bisexual men and transgender people are gone. Pages on racial disparities and HIV are gone.

All research papers that have been submitted for publication and peer review journals are being retracted so that they can be flagged for.

Terms including gender.

Any clinical study is going to reference gender because you have to look at the sex and gender of your participants, for example, to determine if they if they respond differently to a drug based on their sex and on their gender.

So it's fair to say this is ideological rather than scientific.

Oh, absolutely, they're absolutely ideological. The Trump administration would like to assert that there are only two biological sexes, which is male and female, and that assertion is wrong. It's actually scientifically incorrect. It's outdated, and it's dangerous. It ignores decades of research, and it ignores decades of work that has gone into actually trying to incorporate sex and gender into medical research that's vital for public health.

And the idea that you can.

Simply rewrite biology and make this political ideological assertion, that's one of the really what seems to be one of the leading crusades that's going on here in terms of science and medical research.

Right, And so, how is this crusade impacting the scientists themselves? What is happening to them?

A lot of people are really concerned because one of the executive wards was a freeze on all grants coming out of US government, and that extended to all agencies and particularly obviously captured the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

And so for five days there were quite a.

Few scientists in the US who were not able to access their own paychecks.

Lucien and has learned that the Trump Whitehouse has rescinded its freeze on federal aid. It comes up for widespread confusion and conflicting messages on who would have been affected.

The freeze has been temporarily lifted. But how long that's going to last is anyone's guess.

A federal judge said that President Donald Trump violated his order that lifted a blanket freeze on federal spending and again directed the administration to release the funds.

So the big question here ONMNA is does the Trump administration comply with this judge's order?

I asked the White House. They didn't answer that question.

The scientists themselves.

They're just trying to keep on doing what they need to do until they're told otherwise, you know. I mean, the thing with scientific and clinical research is it's not like you can just stop it and pick it back up again in three months.

Time.

If you lose a cell line.

Or if you've got specially bred engineered mice and you lose those, I mean that can terminate an entire study, That can through years of research out the windows.

So I think, really.

What scientists are doing and what they have to do is just keep going, just keep turning up to work, you know. And there's a big effort underway that's being led by a scientist in the US to essentially rescue a lot of that information in those databases and make it online somewhere else so that it's safe from destruction.

Who knows what's going to happen.

After the break, how Australian medical research could be under threat, so Bianca. There's still a lot of confusion on exactly how Trump's executive orders will affect federal grants and loans for health and science research. But the White House Press Secretary is saying that a review to eliminate spending on woke ideology will proceed. So let's talk about what that means for us here in Australia. How could that impact research done here?

Well, it's it's a global impact because the US is such a scientific and medical research powerhouse. The National Institutes of Health, for example, is the single biggest public funder of biomedical research in the world.

So Australia gets.

Probably somewhere between twenty and thirty million dollars worth of grants from the NIH every year.

There's also the National Science Foundation.

There's also research funding that comes to Australia from the Department of Defense. So all of these institutions have temporarily frozen some of those grants, although there is some legal challenges.

To that, so that's sort of a little bit of a movable feast.

We do know that, for example, Vick Thompson, who's CEO of the Group of Eight, which represents Australia's eight leading research intensive universities, they are getting advice around grants that they've received from the US. There's going to be direct effects on scientists in Australia who are funded by these organizations, but there.

Will also be indirect effects on.

Their collaborators and this might lead to large scale clinical trials, halting of new drugs. Studies that have been running for decades might suddenly just go dark because lead investigators based in the US might suddenly not be able to access funding. I mean, it's very chaotic, and I think the impression I get from the Australian scientific and medical research community

Can you tell me about that and who you spoke to.

Yeah, so Professor Aida Cheung, who is based at the University of Melbourne. She's co lead on a project that's looking at how gender affirming hormone therapy affects the immune system. So obviously the face of it, that's really important for transgender health care, but it's also really important for everybody because we are all hormonal creatures and hormones have huge

Health, so she must be concerned.

Oh, absolutely absolutely.

I mean I think you know, anybody working in transgender healthcare right now is concerned not just about what's happening in the US, but even what's happening in Australia in terms of.

Attacks on transgender health care here.

So this is part of a broader and a bigger ideological war that's been going on for a long time.

It's just Trump has really stepped up the beat.

And so if Trump's attack on sciences continue in the US, what do we need to be doing here in Australia to protect research.

Well, I think we need to fund it better Australia.

I mean the number of times I hear people say Australia punch is above its weight, and it does.

For the amount of funding we receive.

We do incredibly well on the world stage with science and medical research, but we really need more funding. So we need to be more independent with our science and medical research funding. We are in the process of setting up our own centers for disease control. That was one of the recommendations that's come out of the COVID pandemic is we need to have a resource like the CDC that's here that's focused on the public health of Australians. So I think this really turbocharge is the need for that.

Science.

It's a human endeavor and we are all operating in a political environment. Science funding is highly politicized in Australia as well. But I think the great thing about science is it comes down to evidence.

It comes down to the facts.

To what the tests tell you, to what the surveys tell you, to what the studies tell you. And you know, I think within Australia we really have to hold the line. We have to hold the line against the return of racism, of sexism and misogyny, of transphobia, of queerphobia. We have to hold the line against that coming into our science and medical research. It was there for a long time and it's taken a lot of progress and a lot of effort to really address those bias.

In particularly in medical research.

And we just have to keep looking at those facts and pull the line against this ideology coming out of the US and stop it taking root here.

Bianca, thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Also in the news today, I just spoke to him, very fine man and he has a surplus. President Trump called Prime Minister Albanezi a quote very fine man.

After the Prime.

Minister made the case for Australia to be exempt from Trump's twenty five percent tariffs on steel and aluminium. Trump said he would give quote great consideration to exempting Australia from the trade restrictions, despite already signing the executive orders that claimed the tariffs were without exception or exemption. And the ABC has withdrawn one of its arguments in Antonetta