🚨 I was close reading the UCLA deal with Trump & found this gem of a ‘typo’ 😮 about UCLA’s “Feinberg School of Medicine”… THERE IS NO FEINNBERG SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT UCLA, they have the Geffen School of Medicine… But there is a Feinberg School at Northwestern (I worked there!), meaning…(1/3)

Join us for the 10th annual Data Jam on Oct. 27. @keyboardbiologist.bsky.social and @michellebirkett.bsky.social, Director of the I.AIM Center for Computational and Social Sciences in Health (COMPASS), are Northwestern organizational leads. www.surveymonkey.com/r/datajam2025

The practical upshot is that justice delayed is justice denied; or to be more precise, a lab which had to fire all of its researchers and halt work on groundbreaking research isn't going to be able to ever restore itself to the same position it would have been without a multi-year pause in funding.

🔬 LAMBDA LEGAL WIN: Today, a preliminary injunction was granted in our lawsuit against the NIH’s termination of 100s of grants that funded critical LGBTQI+ health research. Learn more: tinyurl.com/3u6xcmkh

“Over the last 20 years, there’s been a real recognition of the importance relationships have in our lives, whether that be in infectious disease, public health, information sharing.” @michellebirkett.bsky.social on the success of Network Canvas www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/sites/ipham/...

The full ruling explaining why NIH grant cuts are illegal came out today. It's just as blistering as the judge's oral remarks. And it uncovers fresh details in DOGE's role orchestrating the cuts — and on the cuts at Columbia. Here are my top highlights from the 103-page ruling. 🧵

A huge congrats to the Network Canvas team on receiving the 2025 Richards award 🎉 Their free and open-source program allows researchers to easily design, capture, and export network data. networkcanvas.com (photo by Network Canvas)

Sometimes you don’t realize the full burden you’ve been carrying –of being implicitly treated as a second-class citizen whose life isn’t worth preserving, of people working to fix health inequalities in this country being persecuted, of the crushing *silence* around it – until someone calls it out.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are turning our government into their own slush fund. Attempting to cut Medicaid and Social Security, all while chopping up essential departments and agencies — just to make themselves and their friends even richer.

ISGMH Prof. “Michelle Birkett’s $3.8 million grant was ended in the first of its five years. The funding was awarded to understand — and ultimately address — disparities in HIV transmission and substance use among gay men and transgender women,” reports @bloomberg.com.

🧵Trump is Russifying the American presidency and time of the essence. Russia’s system of government is like a “crown-presidential” system, which makes the president a kind of elected king. Two powers are central to this role....

Congress Targets Northwestern Legal Clinics The university’s legal clinics are under investigation after representing pro-Palestinian Chicago activists. The move raises questions about the fates of other clinical programs. #HigherEd #EDUSky #AcademicSky bit.ly/4ig3PMQ

🚨 BREAKING: I'm suing #RFKJr @ #HHS & #JayBhattacharya @ #NIH Canceling medical research grants threatens innovations benefiting ALL Americans, no matter your politics! 🇺🇸 Thanks to my lawyers @aclu.org @aclum.bsky.social @protectdemocracy.org & @cspi.bsky.social Long 🧵 on why I'm suing 👇 1/

New this evening (3/28): Major update in NIH grant termination numbers. ❌ 695 NIH grants now terminated (up from 429) ❌ 232 on HIV/AIDS ❌ 44 on cancer ❌ 28 on Alzheimer's ❌ 123 on Covid* *And this doesn't count cancelled non-NIH Covid grants. HUGE THANKS to @noamross.net for pushing the updates!

NIH terminated grants for a program studying how to diagnose, treat, and prevent HIV and AIDS in adolescents

The purging of peer review at NIH has begun drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/03/25/t...

This is what breaks my heart. These young people who are so eager and full of promise and who are the next generation of Nobel Prize winners, scientists inventors, teachers. #Trump and #Musk have destroyed it all. www.wired.com/story/the-ch...

And then there were none… My advisor just lost their last remaining federal research grant. All were cancelled for being inclusive of #trans and #nonbinary people. People like us. These grants supported critical research into #LGBTQIA aging, dementia, and caregiving—and funded a staff of 7.

Information Silos exist for very good reasons. Do you want your medical data, tax data, social media days, etc combined in one place and made available to anyone in the federal government?

We've been tracking unlawful NIH grant terminations for 3 weeks. Spread the word👇! Fellow PIs: what can you do upon termination? ✅ Email PO + document questions ✅ Submit FOIA ✅ Advocate to your OCG/OSP for appeal + litigation ✅ Consider outside litigation ✅ Donate to state AGs + legal orgs 1/🧵

The crush of new grant cancellations hasn't let up. If your grant was terminated (or your app was pulled) please use this Google Form👇 to submit details for tracking purposes. Multiple advocacy efforts are moving forward, but we must must must know more about what grants were cancelled and why.

The editor of AIDS and Behavior has a message: In a World Gone Mad -- Nothing is Changing at AIDS and Behavior. "We will persist, with elevated scrutiny, filtering, and yes censoring, pseudoscience and denialism." link.springer.com/article/10.1...

If the government can do this to universities, we don't live in a free society. Five alarm fire.

A timber industry lobbyist & exec now head of US Forest Service. The privatization/sell public lands thugs found their guy. First time in Forest Service history chief wasn’t a career employee. This thug is about to sell off our public lands to create Trump's sovereign wealth fund.

Sharing for visibility www.statnews.com/2025/03/03/n... Thank you @statnews.com

Quick request: Please do contact us if you're a scientist at a university or outside NIH, and you serve on an #NIH council or advisory board, including the intramural Board of Scientific Counselor review boards (the reviews that impose high standards on NIH!) We'd love to be in touch.

These grants survived intense scientific competition and scrutiny by expert peer scientists. It’s a sham to suggest they are unworthy. Pure bigotry to revoke them.

Glad to see this post getting some traction, because the Federal Register is the WHOLE ballgame, folks. To drive this point home, a recent EO declares that all posts to FR now must be approved by the White House. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

🚨 We are mobilizing for a NEW national day of protest— March 4th Against Monarchy! Find organizing resources and more at linktr.ee/fiftyfiftyon.... @polrev.bsky.social @altnps.bsky.social #NoKings #50501movement #FiftyFiftyOne

Tyranny requires your fear, your silence, and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage.

This new Administration is a bunch of terrorists blowing up all that is meant to keep us safe and healthy. CDC cuts expected to devastate Epidemic Intelligence Service, a ‘crown jewel’ of public health www.statnews.com/2025/02/14/t... via @statnews.com

CDC source: “We just had word that all our fellows and post doc staff are laid off effective immediately. The famous Epidemic Intelligence Service, aka the Disease Detectives, is no more. That’s 1260 staff. They are calling this ‘Phase 1’.”

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%. I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Today we're excited to announce a new tool: ChicagoAQI.com It's for two things: suggesting locations for city air monitors, and exploring data from Chicago's cumulative impacts assessment. Spanish: es.chicagoaqi.com Chinese: cn.chicagoaqi.com

I’ve unfortunately needed to add more material to my post from yesterday. The re-election of Donald Trump is looking like the biggest act of American self-destruction since the Civil War. Same link, new title and some updates.

Just in case you thought that removing DEI criteria would mean that everyone is competing equally: NIH is removing grad students from underrepresented backgrounds from the applicant pool altogether. Their applications will not be considered. Other students, not from these backgrounds, will be.

I received an email from NIH stating that applications are being removed from an upcoming study section. I am dismayed that NIH is folding.

Extremely disappointed to see HHMI decide to kill their Inclusive Excellence program, including terminating the current IE3 awards to over a hundred institutions effective this year in the middle of a 6-year grant. I was hoping HHMI (and other private funders) would continue to lead the way.

Thuggery:

Joanna’s video DARK GOTHIC MAGA has now reached over 200k views, youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no?... please watch and support!

In my years of reporting on LGBTQ news this was by far the hardest. But we are still here. You made it to Friday. You lived. Good job. That wasn’t easy. Through a diversity of tactics, we will continue to live. Rest up, drink water, find community, so that we can all be here tomorrow too.

I’ve now posted the National YRBS data, 2015-2023, here. I’ll add the state and district data soon. www.datalumos.org/datalumos/pr...

NEW: Organizations that provide vital, lifesaving care for desperate and vulnerable people around the world have been forced to halt operations, turn away patients and lay off staff. “I’ve never seen anything that scares me as much as this,” one doctor said.

CDC pages relating to LGBTQ+ queer health are being removed from the CDC website. Staff are not involved in this censorship. We will follow up with external resources for our communities.

When you can only win with disinformation, data become a threat.

Confirmed.