Bhattacharya’s Battle for NIH Is Worth Fighting

I f confirmed, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, has the opportunity to bring much-needed accountability and mission-oriented leadership to an organization in desperate need of both.

Most Americans would be incensed if they paid millions of dollars for research into critically important subject matter only to be denied access to the results of the research because the well-funded experts did not like the outcome. In fact, American taxpayers did pay for research — $9.7 million worth — the findings of which are being held captive by an agenda of politicized medical care.

Representative Lisa McClain, who chairs the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s subcommittee on health-care and financial services, recently sent a letter to the current NIH director, Dr. Monica Bertagnolli. The subject of the letter is the ongoing research project titled, “The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth.”

The letter states in part, “We are alarmed that the project’s principal investigator, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, is withholding publication of the project’s research findings which cast doubt on the efficacy of the ‘gender affirming’ model, because she believes the findings could be ‘weaponized’ by critics of transgender medical interventions for children.”

Yesterday’s “follow the science” is today’s “weaponization.” Olson-Kennedy’s fear that critics of using drugs to suppress puberty in adolescents might utilize the findings of her research is as irrelevant as it is nonsensical. What is the point of research if it cannot be implemented to improve outcomes for patients? The real problem for Olson-Kennedy and others who push the use of puberty blockers to “affirm” transgender identity is that the evidence doesn’t support their claim of improved mental health.

Based on the lies that biological sex can be changed and a person “born in the wrong body” can transform physical characteristics to assuage mental anguish, far too many children are suffering the effects of dangerous, experimental “treatments.” Inflicting irreversible physical damage, sterilization, and a lifetime of medical care on a child is not health care. It is harm. Far too many parents have been deceived by the lie that they must choose between a dead daughter or a living son, when research shows these procedures offer no reduction in the risk of suicide for gender-dysphoric minors and adolescents.

Based on the truth that boys cannot become girls, 24 states have now passed laws protecting children from the harms of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries. After all, minors lack the capacity to consent to life-altering procedures, and no one has the right to harm a child. The State of Tennessee recently defended such a law at the U.S. Supreme Court. When the federal government uses taxpayer money to research the impact of these attempts to distort reality, at a minimum the American people deserve the results of what they paid for.

The confirmation hearing for Bhattacharya will give the American people’s elected representatives the chance to ask the nominee fundamental questions on a host of topics, including the NIH’s taxpayer-funded research. That would be a good place to begin; however, ending the failed experiment of damaging healthy bodies to conform to suffering minds — a sort of neo-Gnosticism in medicine — should be the ultimate destination.

Mark Twain popularized the saying, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” When it comes to treating those struggling with mental-health issues related to their sex, all three are being employed to the detriment of some of the most vulnerable members of society. If confirmed as the new NIH director, Bhattacharya should unflinchingly shine the light of truth on the subject to lead the medical community back to its original mission of alleviating suffering — or at the very least, as the Hippocratic Oath implies, “Do no harm.”