NBC NEWS – Two Harvard medical school professors claim in a lawsuit filed against the Trump administration that their research was pulled from a public government website because it referred to the LGBTQ community.
Gordon Schiff and Celeste Royce said removing their work from the website, which focuses on patient safety, violates their First Amendment right to free speech.
They claimed the administration unlawfully and dangerously suppressed their information on how to improve patient diagnoses, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S District Court in Boston.
Each year, about 795,000 Americans die or are permanently disabled due to misdiagnosis, according to the suit filed on behalf of Schiff and Royce by the the American Civil Liberties Union and the Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic.
“Allowing the government to censor research regarding patient safety for political reasons will almost assuredly increase that number,” the suit read.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which falls under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, removed the private doctors’ peer-reviewed articles solely because they contained terms such as “LGBTQ” and “transgender,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit names the U.S. Officer of Personnel Management, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality as defendants.
The lawsuit said the articles were removed because it was perceived that they violated an executive order on gender ideology signed by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20.
The site, Patient Safety Network, emailed Schiff and his co-authors on Jan. 31 to inform them an article on suicide risk that included the words “LGBTQ” and “transgender” was being removed, the lawsuit said.
Another article on the medical condition endometriosis was removed because it mentioned the word transgender, it said.
Rachel Davidson, an attorney with the ACLU of Massachusetts, said removing the articles and censoring medical research is a serious constitutional violation …
