Political Agendas in the HHS?

bungadiri · Oct 28, 2003

From CBS News:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/28/health/main580425.shtml

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said the phone calls to the scientists are "sending a dangerous message" that research is being subverted to an ideological agenda.

NIH spokesman John Burklow said his agency simply was responding to a request from Republican lawmakers who were given a list of the research grants. The projects include studying subjects such as teenagers' sexual activity, sex and drug use among truckers and sexually transmitted diseases among Mexican immigrants.

Burklow said the calls were not intended to threaten researchers that they could lose their funding but to inform them that their names were on a list being circulated in Washington.

He said officials also were trying to put the research into the context of the agency's "scientific mission."
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SF Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/28/MNGSD2KOBL1.DTL

A government document naming 157 scientists who study AIDS and human sexuality is alarming university researchers, who call it a Republican "hit list'' that may be used to target prevention programs that some members of Congress find offensive.

National Institutes of Health program officers, who are responsible for overseeing research funded by the federal agency, have been asking members on the list for thumbnail descriptions about the "public benefit" of their projects, which in most cases have already been approved and funded, according to several scientists familiar with the list.

Named on the list are researchers from some of the most prestigious universities in the country, including Johns Hopkins University, Harvard and UCSF.
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Rep. Henry Waxman has sent a letter to Thompson, of HHS. I'm trying to find a copy of it. In it he cites evidence suggesting the people who came up with the list are in HHS.

bungadiri · Oct 30, 2003

A pdf version of the letter is here:

http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdfs_108/pdf_inves/pdf_admin_nih_hit_list_oct_27_let.pdf

On October 2, 2003, the Senate HELP Committee and House Energy and Commerce Committee held a joint hearing on the future of NIH*. At the hearing, several Republican members of Congress repeatedly asked NIH Director Elias Zerhouni about several peer-reviewed grants that they described as "provocative." Around the time of the hearing, congressional Republicans gave NIH an extensive list of targeted researchers and projects. This "hit list" appears to be part of a calculated effort to subvert science and scientists at NIH to a right-wing ideological agenda...
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(*National Institutes of Health: the collection of federal organizations responsible for designing and running the Federal grant programs for health and medical related research.)

And, just to be fair, here’s the Washington Time’s take on this, with a quote from the woman who claims to be the ultimate source of the list.

http://washingtontimes.com/national/20031027-112453-2197r.htm

"The research is my research, mine and my staff," says Mrs. Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition. "We began collecting the information [on the list] under the Clinton administration ... and worked on it for months and months."

The list represents "almost $100 million of NIH grants that we wanted looked into," Mrs. Lafferty says, "such as studying the sex habits of illegal immigrants ... [and] prostitutes that hang out at truck stops." She calls NIH "a bureaucracy run amok."
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One of the things I’m curious about is why she thinks there’s something wrong when HIV-related research looks at the sex habits of illegal immigrants or hookers at truck stops. For example, HIV probably began it’s initial spread through Africa via contacts between truckers and hookers on a transcontinental highway.