Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“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 20 minutes ago at 5pm Eastern time.”

Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“And the CDC is cutting off all communications with the world health organisation, effective immediately. The move is to comply with the executive order President Trump signed last week, withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO.”

Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“The CDC website on youth LGBTQ mental health was up running January 23, but if you look today you get a message that reads ‘the page you’re looking for was not found.”

RUBY:

Right now, there’s a note at the top of all webpages for the U.S. Centres for Disease Control. It says: this website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.

Thousands of pages across U.S. 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 the Trump administration’s attack on science.

Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders, signed since coming into office, also threaten the funding of any research projects they consider to promote “woke gender ideology”.

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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Today, science journalist and contributor to The Saturday Paper Bianca Nogrady, on America's ideological war on science and the implications for Australia.

It’s Wednesday, February 12.

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RUBY:

So Bianca, I’m hoping you can help me unpack the impact of Trump’s orders and understand the situation right now because so many organisations are affected in different ways, so to begin with, can you tell me about the situation at the Centres for Disease Control?

BIANCA:

It's chaos, I think is probably the only word I can think of. So the Centres for Disease Control, it's the leading national science based organisation for public health. So its job is to track disease outbreaks, to collect data, to analyse 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 U.S. but beyond its borders globally.

It’s particularly important at the moment because we’ve got bird flu H5N1 in birds which in the U.S. has also spread into dairy cattle, cats, foxes and into humans. And at the moment it's not spreading between humans but it's an evolving situation and 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 a communications blackout. So no public communications, no public speaking coming out of anyone at the CDC.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“The Trump administration has told federal health agencies to pause external communications that include scientific reports and health advisories.”

BIANCA:

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

Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“According to a copy of the data obtained by the NY times, the CDC pulled a part of the report that said some cases of bird flu had infected cats who had in turn infected humans.”

BIANCA:

Scientists are banned from travelling, so they are 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 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.

RUBY:

And the CDC is not the only body in the U.S. affected, what else is happening?

BIANCA:

Yeah, I mean we’ve seen the attack on transgender health care. We sort of knew this was coming but I think it's still so deeply shocking to see, you know, 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 truth to the federal government.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“It will henceforth be an official policy of the United States government that there are only genders, male and female.”

BIANCA:

That's led to a memorandum that came out of the Office of Personnel Management which talked about that they have to review all agency programs, contracts and grants and terminate any that promote or inculcate gender ideology.

Audio excerpt — Speaker:

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

BIANCA:

All research papers that have been submitted for publication in peer reviewed 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.

RUBY:

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

BIANCA:

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. Like 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.

RUBY:

Right and how has this crusade impacted the scientists themselves? What’s happening to them?

BIANCA:

A lot of people are really concerned because one of the executive orders was a freeze on all grants coming out of the U.S. 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 U.S. who were not able to access their own paycheques.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“The CNN has learned that the Trump White House has rescinded its freeze on federal aid. It comes after widespread confusion and conflicting messages on who would’ve been affected.”

BIANCA:

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

Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“Today, 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.”

Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“So the big question here is, does the Trump administration comply with this judge's order? I asked the White House. They didn't answer that question.”

BIANCA:

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 got specially bred engineered mice and you lose those, I mean that can terminate an entire study that can throw years of research out the window.

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

Who knows what’s going to happen?

RUBY:

After the break - how Australian medical research could be under threat.

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RUBY:

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 that could impact research done here?

BIANCA:

Well, it's a global impact because the U.S. 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 $20 and $30 million 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 Defence. So all of these institutions have temporarily frozen some of those grants, although there are some legal challenges to that. So that's sort of a little bit of a moveable feast.

We do know that, for example, Dick 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 U.S..

There's going to be direct effects on scientists in Australia who are funded by these organisations, 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 the lead investigators based in the U.S. might suddenly not be able to access funding. I mean, it's it's very chaotic.

And I think the impression I get from the Australian scientific and medical research community is they're very concerned and we do have researchers in Australia who are funded by institutions like the NIH, in one case specifically to look at an issue that does relate to transgender health care.

RUBY:

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

BIANCA:

Yes. So Professor Ada 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, at 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 impact on our immune system. You know, Professor Cheung has, as far as I know, has not received any information yet about what's happening with that grant. But that is an ongoing grant from the National Institutes of Health.

RUBY:

She must be concerned.

BIANCA:

Absolutely, absolutely. I think, you know, anybody working in transgender health care right now is concerned not just about what's happening in the U.S., 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.

RUBY:

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

BIANCA:

Well, I think we need to fund it better. Australia, I mean, the number of times I hear people say Australia punches 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 centres 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 focussed on the public health of Australians. So I think this really turbocharges is the need for that.

Science it’s a human endeavour. And we are all operating in a political environment. Science funding is highly politicised 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 queer phobia. We have to hold a 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 biases, in particular medical research. And we just have to keep looking at those facts and hold the line against this ideology coming out of the U.S. and stop it taking root here.

RUBY:

Bianca, thank you for your time.

BIANCA:

Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

Audio excerpt — Donald Trump:

“I just spoke to him, very fine man and he has a surplus!”

RUBY:

President Trump called Prime Minister Albanese a quote “very fine man”, after the prime minister made the case for Australia to be exempt from Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium.

Trump said he would give quote “great consideration” to exempting Australia from the trade restrictions, despite already signing executive orders that claim for tariffs without exception or exemption.

And, the ABC has withdrawn one of its arguments in Antoinette Lattouf’s unlawful termination case.

Lattouf’s lawyers argued that race played a role in their decision to terminate her casual position at ABC Radio Sydney. In response, the ABC’s lawyers had initially tried to argue there was no such thing as a quote “Lebanese, Arab or Middle Eastern race.”

At the start of Tuesday’s hearing in the Federal Court, the ABC updated its defence to accept those races exist.

I am Ruby Jones. This is 7am. Thanks for listening.

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