Two California researchers said on Friday that an American publication from the US government instructed them to remove data on sexual orientation from a scientific manuscript accepted for publication.
The researchers also said that they were told to remove the words ‘gender’, ‘cisgender’ and ‘fair’ from their newspaper, who looked at smoking among young adults in the countryside.
The reason for the changes was to comply with an executive order by President Donald Trump, researchers Tamar Antin and Rachelle Annechino said in a blog post where they contain screenshots of the revisions.
Instead of complying with it, the researchers withdrew their paper from public health reports, the official magazine of the US Surgeon General and the US Public Health Service.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order that ordered government agencies to remove ‘genital ideology’ from publications. He signed other orders aimed at diversity, fairness and inclusion initiatives.
The researchers plan to publish their findings elsewhere, Antin told The Associated Press. In the blog post, Antin and Annechino requested other researchers not to publish them in scholarly journals published by the federal government to avoid political interference.
“In normal times, this would never happen,” says Antin, director of the Center for Critical Public Health, a California research group. ‘I have never been asked to censor articles for publication, and to my knowledge, one of my colleagues has never been asked to censor words, word choice or removing data from a publication following an executive order of the White House. This is extremely unusual. ‘
Screen shots in the blog post show that the data in categories ‘straight or heterosexual’, ‘gay or lesbian’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘unknown’ are represented. A remark reads: “According to the executive order, we cannot include language around gender.”
Understanding how smoking fits in the lives of rural young adults of all generations and sexual orientations can help adjust more effective public health messages, Antin said. And it is a long -time practice to include these demographic variables in research.
Antin said censorship is threatening scientific integrity and in this case appears to violate the policy of the US Department of Health and Human Services, which says that scientific findings should not be “improperly suppressed, delayed or changed for political purposes.”
A spokesman for the HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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