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 White House did not return a request for comment Thursday.
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.
“It is a fundamental principle of the First Amendment that the government cannot restrict speech just because it disagrees with the viewpoint of that speech,” she said. “We think that is especially important in areas of scientific inquiry and debate and research.”
Schiff and Royce could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Both say in the lawsuit that they refuse to censor their medical conclusions, and they brought the lawsuit to “defend the integrity of medical research and the safety of patients from the government’s dangerous, arbitrary, and unconstitutional censorship.”
Schiff, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, is a founding member of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine and the American Public Health Association’s Quality Improvement Committee.
Royce is an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology. One of her areas of study is the role of clinical reasoning in improving patient safety, according to the lawsuit.
