GOP state AGs push back after medical groups urge Garland to prosecute sex-change ‘disinformation’

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Thirteen Republican state attorneys general warned the federal Justice Department against prosecuting critics of gender-transition procedures for minors after leading medical associations urged U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to target perpetrators of what they said was “disinformation.”

“We respectfully demand that you stand down and allow the national conversation to continue. Now is a time for more speech, not less,” said the Wednesday letter led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.

Read more at the Washington Times.

13 State AGs Demand Garland Not Use DOJ to ‘Investigate and Prosecute’ Speech Critical of ‘Gender-Affirming Treatments’

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“You cannot and should not undertake such investigations or prosecutions,” 13 state attorneys general warn U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in a letter demanding that he not comply with censorship demands from three medical associations supporting “gender-affirming” treatments for children.

As CNSNews.com reported earlier this month, a joint letter from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Medical Association (AMA), and Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) asked Garland to take “swift action to investigate and prosecute” anyone, on social media or elsewhere, who speaks out against gender-transition treatments.

Read more at CNS News.

‘Stand Down’: 13 State AGs Tell Merrick Garland Not to Prosecute Child Transition Surgery Critics

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Thirteen state attorneys general have warned U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland against prosecuting critics of child gender transition surgeries.

The letter comes as the left-wing medical establishment, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Medical Association (AMA), and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA), sent a letter to Garland asking him to investigate and prosecute those who disagree with their practices on treating gender dysphoria in children.

Read more at Breitbart.com.

State AGs warn Garland against prosecuting child transition surgery critics: ‘stand down’

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FIRST ON FOX: A group of thirteen state attorneys general warned Attorney General Merrick Garland against investigating and prosecuting critics of child gender transition surgeries.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti led the letter with 12 of his fellow state attorneys general to Garland on Wednesday, demanding President Biden’s attorney general “stand down” on several medical organizations’ requests to investigate “disinformation campaigns” about child gender transitions. 

Read more at Fox News.

Texas Nurse Fired for Refusing Implicit Bias Training

After spending decades in the profession caring for patients, in 2019, Laura Morgan became a nurse educator at Baylor, Scott & White (BSW) Hospital in College Station, Texas. There she helped provide continuing education and professional development courses for other nurses and health professionals until conflict over a new training module led to her termination earlier this year.

In September 2021, BSW introduced a new mandatory training session entitled “Overcoming Unconscious Bias,” which Morgan says makes assumptions about all white people.

“After 39 years of providing equal care to all patients without regard to their race, I objected to a mandatory course grounded in the idea that I’m racist because I’m white,” Morgan wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

Read more at The Texan.

NYU’s firing of Professor Maitland Jones Jr. should frighten every American

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New York University fired Maitland Jones Jr. because his organic chemistry course was “too hard.” The man wrote the textbook on the subject, now in its fifth edition, and had been a star teacher at Princeton. He went out of his way to tape his lectures, at his own cost, to mitigate some of the attendance problems attributed to the pandemic.

Yet students revolted because they feared, according to the New York Times, that “they were not given the grades that would allow them to get into medical school.”

The professor, meanwhile, saw a different problem: “They weren’t coming to class. … They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.” But the school terminated his employment rather than the students, who are on track to become physicians despite struggling to get into med school.

Read more at the New York Post.

Implicit Bias Training Cost Me My Nursing Job

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I was fired from my nursing job this year for refusing to take “implicit bias” training. After 39 years of providing equal care to all my patients without regard to their race, I objected to a mandatory course grounded in the idea that I’m racist because I’m white. I fear every healthcare professional will soon be forced to make the same awful decision I did: Falsely admit to being racist or abandon the medical field.

My ordeal started in September 2021 when my employer, Dallas-based Baylor Scott & White Health, rolled out its annual training modules for clinical educators. The list included “Overcoming Unconscious Bias.” After viewing the interactive course, I contacted my supervisor and asked for a meeting with the chief nursing officer and the human resources director. The former sent a surrogate; the latter didn’t attend. After two meetings, it was clear that I wouldn’t be given an exemption. My supervisor told me, “I don’t want you to die on this cross.”

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

UPenn doctor: ‘Anti-racist’ policies are wrecking American medicine

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, is giving members of his profession heart palpitations.

Goldfarb, 78, says new “anti-racism” med school policies are lowering standards, reducing students to the color of their skin and corrupting medicine in general — much to the outrage of his fellow faculty members.

“I understand we need to give people more opportunities,” Goldfarb, a trained nephrologist, told The Post. “But there are some things you can’t sacrifice. This focus on diversity means we’re going to take someone with a certain skin color because we think they’re OK, that they can do the work. But we’re not going to look for the best and the brightest. We’re going to look for people who are just OK to make sure we have the right mixture of ethnic groups in our medical schools.”

Read more at the New York Post.

The Hidden Transgender Consensus

Few issues these days inspire agreement among large swathes of voters from both parties, but one notable exception appears to be gender-identity policies.

Last April, a Marist poll commissioned by the organization Do No Harm asked 1,377 Americans about their views on the infiltration of “social justice” ideology into medicine. One question asked whether “minors who identify as transgender and want to undergo hormone treatment or gender transition surgery” should be able to do so “without parental consent,” “only with parental consent,” or not until adulthood (regardless of parental consent). Only 10 percent of all adults surveyed said that minors should be able to access these interventions without parental consent. Twenty-five percent said that parental consent should be required, and 60 percent said minors should never be subject to hormonal or surgical interventions in this context (5 percent were unsure). These findings more or less track with those from a recent New York Times/Siena Poll on (among other things) teaching “sexual orientation and gender identity” content in elementary schools, and it is reasonable to assume that the same people who believe it’s unacceptable for teachers to introduce first-graders to, say, the concept of “non-binary” also think that 12-year-old children should not be given puberty blockers for feeling like they were “born in the wrong body.”

Read more at the City Journal.

Shareholders Demand Pfizer Scrap Race-Conscious Policies in the Wake of Civil Rights Lawsuit

That didn’t take long. Less than a week after Pfizer was hit with a lawsuit over a fellowship program that excludes whites and Asians, shareholders are demanding that the company scrap a spate of race-conscious policies that they say put it at risk of further litigation.

The lawsuit, filed Sept. 15, argues that Pfizer is violating federal law by excluding white and Asian applicants from its prestigious “Breakthrough Fellowship.” In an open letter to Pfizer executives last week, shareholders allege that the program is just one of several policies that invite a “pandora’s box” of civil rights complaints.

Read more on the Washington Free Beacon.

Pfizer sued for excluding White, Asian candidates from fellowship

A health care advocacy group has sued Pfizer in federal court, alleging the pharmaceutical giant violated the Civil Rights Act by excluding Whites and Asians from a racial equity fellowship.

Do No Harm filed the lawsuit Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. It claims the New York-based company’s Breakthrough Fellowship Program defies the law’s color-blind definition of racial discrimination under Title VI because it accepts reimbursements from federal healthcare programs.

Read more on the Washington Times.

Pfizer Hit With Lawsuit Over Fellowship That Excludes Whites and Asians

Pfizer is being sued for excluding whites and Asians from its prestigious “Breakthrough Fellowship,” a nine-year program that includes a fully funded master’s degree and guaranteed employment with the pharmaceutical giant.

The lawsuit, filed on Thursday by the medical advocacy group Do No Harm, says that the program’s exclusionary criteria violate five different civil rights laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans racial discrimination in contracting; New York City and New York State’s human rights laws, which ban race discrimination in internships, training programs, and employment; Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans race discrimination in federally funded entities; and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which bans race discrimination in federally funded health care programs.

Read more on the Washington Free Beacon.

Antiracism effort in health care could itself lead to bias

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Everyone involved in health care can agree on two truths: First, many minority populations have unequal access to care. Second, as a result, they often have disparate health outcomes.

Yet acknowledging these truths does not lead to LaShyra Nolen’s conclusion that health care must be “antiracist” (“Woke medicine doesn’t mean worse medicine,” Ideas, Sept. 11). In practice, what Nolen calls for could lead to health care that deliberately discriminates on the basis of race — a false cure.

To see what antiracism means, consider the antiracist pilot program that two Harvard Medical School professors announced last year at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. They pledged to provide a “preferential admission option” for certain minority patients, requiring overt discrimination by skin color. Writ large, antiracism would embed this divisive and dangerous practice across all of health care. Patients could be denied or delayed treatment, not because of their medical needs, but because of their race.

By all means, let’s break down barriers that prevent many minorities from accessing care. But let’s not push the life-saving institution of health care toward racial discrimination of any kind and the resulting damage it could entail.

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb
Bryn Mawr, Pa.

The writer is chairman of the advocacy group Do No Harm and former associate dean of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lawsuit claims Pfizer fellowship discriminates against whites and Asians

A national association of medical professionals has filed a lawsuit against pharmaceutical giant Pfizer , alleging that the company runs a fellowship that illegally excludes white and Asian American applicants.

Do No Harm claimed that Pfizer’s Breakthrough Fellowship Program violates several state and federal laws as it is racially discriminatory and requires that applicants meet its stated aim of “increasing the pipeline for Black/African American, Latino/Hispanic and Native Americans.”

Read more on the Washington Examiner.

Pfizer Sued for Discriminating against White, Asian Fellowship Applicants

Do No Harm, a nonprofit whose mission is to “protect health care from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology,” recently sued Pfizer, arguing that the pharmaceutical giant’s “Breakthrough Fellowship Program” illegally discriminates by race.

Pfizer describes the fellowship on its website as “a nine-year commitment to increase minority representation at Pfizer, designed to enhance our pipeline of diverse leaders.” The program “works to advance students and early career colleagues of Black/African American, Latino/Hispanic and Native American descent with a goal of developing 100 fellows by 2025.”

Read more on National Review.

Critical Race Theory Is Bad Medicine

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The American College of Surgeons promotes the latest political quackery.

My membership in the American College of Surgeons goes back almost 30 years. The 84,000-member professional society’s sole focus should be improving the standard of surgical care, but in recent years the college has made a priority of promoting critical race theory and so-called antiracism. Like many radicalized organizations, the college has taken to punishing members who raise concerns over its new agenda.

The college’s elevation of ideology—and demotion of surgery—was swift. I saw the first signs in 2019, when the college invited Joan Y. Reede to deliver its prestigious annual lecture. Dr. Reede is dean for diversity and community partnership at Harvard Medical School. The topic of her speech was “a path toward diversity, inclusion, and excellence.”

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

Richard Bosshardt, M.D. is a visiting fellow at Do No Harm.

Health care journal sued for excluding White candidates from fellowship

A health care advocacy group has filed a federal lawsuit against the journal Health Affairs, alleging it violated the Civil Rights Act by excluding White candidates from a racial equity fellowship.

Do No Harm filed the lawsuit last week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It alleges that the monthly journal’s Health Equity Fellowship for Trainees defies the law’s color-blind definition of racial discrimination under Title VI because publisher Project HOPE accepts government funding.

Read more on the Washington Times.

‘The Bible Of Health Policy’ Offers A Race-Based Fellowship Program

A prestigious health journal offers a fellowship that appears to bar white applicants from joining, according to a complaint against the program filed in a U.S. District Court and obtained by the Daily Caller.

Health Affairs is currently accepting applications for its “Health Equity Fellowship,” which requires that applicants identify as “American Indian/Alaskan Native, African American/Black, Asian American, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander, and Hispanic/Latino.” Applicants must also be researching topics that advance “racial health equity among historically marginalized populations.”

The program is designed to “advance racial equity in health policy and health services scholarly publishing.”

Read more on the Daily Caller.