Two teachers from the Harvard Medicine School claim in a lawsuit filed against the Trump administration that their research was extracted from a public government website because it referred to the LGBTQ community.
Gordon Schiff and Celeste Royce said that eliminating their work from the website, which focuses on patient safety, violates its right of the first amendment to freedom of expression. They affirmed that the administration illegally and dangerously suppressed their information on how to improve patient diagnoses, according to the lawsuit filed on Wednesday at the United States District Court in Boston.
Every year, around 795,000 Americans die or are permanently disabled due to an erroneous diagnosis, according to the lawsuit filed in the name of Schiff and Royce by the American Union of Civil Liberties and the Clinic of Access to Information of the Faculty of Law of Yale the Law.
“Allowing the Government to censor patient safety research for political reasons will increase almost that number,” said the demand.
The Research and Quality Agency of Medical Care, which is under the Department of Health and Human Services of the United States, eliminated the articles reviewed by pairs of private doctors only because they contained terms such as “LGBTQ” and “transgender”, says the demand.
The lawsuit appoints the United States personnel management officer, the US Department of Health and Human Services. And the Health Research and Quality Agency as defendants.
The lawsuit said the articles were eliminated because it was perceived that they violated an executive order on gender ideology signed by President Donald Trump on January 20.
The White House did not return a request for comments on Thursday.
The site, the patient safety network, sent an email to Schiff and its co -authors on January 31 to inform them an article about the risk of suicide that included the words “LGBTQ” and “transgender”, was eliminating, the demand said.
Another article on the endometriosis of the medical condition was eliminated because he mentioned the transgender word, he said.
Rachel Davidson, lawyer of the Massachusetts aclu, said that eliminating articles and censoring medical research is a serious constitutional violation.
“It is a fundamental principle of the first amendment that the Government cannot restrict speech just because it does not agree with the point of view of that speech,” he said. “We believe it is especially important in areas of scientific research, debate and research.”
Schiff and Royce could not be contacted to comment on Thursday.
Both say in the demand that they refuse to censor their medical conclusions, and filed the demand to “defend the integrity of medical research and the safety of patients of dangerous, arbitrary and unconstitutional censorship of the government.”
Schiff, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard, is a founding member of the Company to improve the diagnosis in Medicine and the Quality Improvement Committee of the American Public Health Association.
Royce is an assistant professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology. According to demand, one of its study areas is the role of clinical reasoning to improve patient safety.
