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Kennedy's Ruinous Science Funding Choices Will Devastate Red States

Kennedy's Ruinous Science Funding Choices Will Devastate Red States

The National Institutes of Health’s sweeping cuts of grants that fund scientific research are inflicting pain almost universally across the U.S., including in most states that backed President Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

A KFF Health News analysis underscores that the terminations are sparing no part of the country, politically or geographically. About 40% of organizations whose grants the NIH cut in its first month of slashing, which started Feb. 28, are in states Trump won in November.

The Trump administration has singled out Ivy League universities including Columbia and Harvard for broad federal funding cuts. But the spending reductions at the NIH, the nation’s foremost source of funding for biomedical research, go much further: Of about 220 organizations that had grants terminated, at least 94 were public universities, including flagship state schools in places such as Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Nebraska, and Texas.

The Trump administration has canceled hundreds of grants supporting research on topics such as vaccination; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and the health of LGBTQ+ populations. Some of the terminations are a result of Trump’s executive orders to abandon federal work on diversity and equity issues. Others followed the Senate confirmation of anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH. Many mirror the ambitions laid out in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, the far-right playbook for Trump’s second term.

Affected researchers say Trump administration officials are taking a cudgel to efforts to improve the lives of people who often experience worse health outcomes — ignoring a scientific reality that diseases and other conditions do not affect all Americans equally.

KFF Health News found that the NIH terminated about 780 grants or parts of grants between Feb. 28 and March 28, based on documents published by the Department of Health and Human Services and a list maintained by academic researchers. Some grants were canceled in full, while in other cases, only supplements — extra funding related to the main grant, usually for a shorter-term, related project — were terminated.

Among U.S. recipients, 96 of the institutions that lost grants in the first month are in politically conservative states including Florida, Ohio, and Indiana, where Republicans control the state government or voters reliably support the GOP in presidential campaigns, or in purple states such as North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that were presidential battleground states. An additional 124 institutions are in blue states.

Sybil Hosek, a research professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, helps run a network that focuses on improving care for people 13 to 24 years old who are living with or at risk for HIV. The NIH awarded Florida State University $73 million to lead the HIV project.

“We never thought they would destroy an entire network dedicated to young Americans,” said Hosek, one of the principal investigators of the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions. The termination “doesn’t make sense to us.”

NIH official Michelle Bulls is director of the Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration, which oversees grants policy and compliance across NIH institutes. In terminating the grant March 21, Bulls wrote that research “based primarily on artificial and nonscientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”

Adolescents and young adults ages 13 to 24 accounted for 1 in 5 new HIV infections in the U.S. in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It’s science in its highest form,” said Lisa Hightow-Weidman, a professor at Florida State University who co-leads the network. “I don’t think we can make America healthy again if we leave youth behind.”

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said in an emailed statement that “NIH is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities.” The NIH and the White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“As we begin to Make America Healthy Again, it's important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans. We will leave no stone unturned in identifying the root causes of the chronic disease epidemic as part of our mission to Make America Healthy Again,” Hilliard said.

Harm to HIV, Vaccine Studies

The NIH, with its nearly $48 billion annual budget, is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, awarding nearly 59,000 grants in the 2023 fiscal year. The Trump administration has upended funding for projects that were already underway, stymied money for new applications, and sought to reduce how much recipients can spend on overhead expenses.

Those changes — plus the firing of 1,200 agency employees as part of mass layoffs across the government — are alarming scientists and NIH workers, who warn that they will undermine progress in combating diseases and other threats to the nation’s public health. On April 2, the American Public Health Association, Ibis Reproductive Health, and affected researchers, among others, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the NIH and HHS to halt the grant cancellations.

Two National Cancer Institute employees, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press and feared retaliation, said its staff receives batches of grants to terminate almost daily. On Feb. 27, the cancer institute had more than 10,800 active projects, the highest share of the NIH’s roughly two dozen institutes and centers, according to the NIH’s website. At least 47 grants that NCI awarded were terminated in the first month.

Kennedy has said the NIH should take a years-long pause from funding infectious disease research. In November 2023, he told an anti-vaccine group, “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, ‘God bless you all. Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years,’” according to NBC News.

For years, Kennedy has peddled falsehoods about vaccines — including that “no vaccine” is “safe and effective,” and that “there are other studies out there” showing a connection between vaccines and autism, a link that has repeatedly been debunked — and claimed falsely that HIV is not the only cause of AIDS.

KFF Health News found that grants in blue states were disproportionately affected, making up roughly two-thirds of terminated grants, many of them at Columbia University. The university had more grants terminated than all organizations in politically red states combined. On April 4, Democratic attorneys general in 16 states sued HHS and the NIH to block the agency from canceling funds.

Researchers whose funding was stripped said they stopped clinical trials and other work on improving care for people with HIV, reducing vaping and smoking rates among LGBTQ+ teens and young adults, and increasing vaccination rates for young children. NIH grants routinely span several years.

For example, Hosek said that when the youth HIV/AIDS network’s funding was terminated, she and her colleagues were preparing to launch a clinical trial examining whether a particular antibiotic that is effective for men to prevent sexually transmitted infections would also work for women.

“This is a critically important health initiative focused on young women in the United States,” she said. “Without that study, women don’t have access to something that men have.”

Other scientists said they were testing how to improve health outcomes among newborns in rural areas with genetic abnormalities, or researching how to improve flu vaccination rates among Black children, who are more likely to be hospitalized and die from the virus than non-Hispanic white children.

“It's important for people to know that — if, you know, they are wondering if this is just a waste of time and money. No, no. It was a beautiful and rare thing that we did,” said Joshua Williams, a pediatric primary care doctor at Denver Health in Colorado who was researching whether sharing stories about harm experienced due to vaccine-preventable diseases — from missed birthdays to hospitalizations and job loss — might inspire caregivers to get their children vaccinated against the flu.

He and his colleagues had recruited 200 families, assembled a community advisory board to understand which vaccinations were top priorities, created short videos with people who had experienced vaccine-preventable illness, and texted those videos to half of the caregivers participating in the study.

They were just about to crack open the medical records and see if it had worked: Were the group who received the videos more likely to follow through on vaccinations for their children? That’s when he got the notice from the NIH.

“It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focuses gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment,” the notice read.

Williams said the work was already having an impact as other institutions were using the idea to start projects related to cancer and dialysis.

A Hit to Rural Health

Congress previously tried to ensure that NIH grants also went to states that historically have had less success obtaining biomedical research funding from the government. Now those places aren’t immune to the NIH’s terminations.

Sophia Newcomer, an associate professor of public health at the University of Montana, said she had 18 months of work left on a study examining undervaccination among infants, which means they were late in receiving recommended childhood vaccines or didn’t receive the vaccines at all. Newcomer had been analyzing 10 years of CDC data about children’s vaccinations and had already found that most U.S. infants from 0 to 19 months old were not adequately vaccinated.

Her grant was terminated March 10, with the NIH letter stating the project “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” a phrase replicated in other termination letters KFF Health News has reviewed.

“States like Montana don’t get a lot of funding for health research, and health researchers in rural areas of the country are working on solutions to improve rural health care,” Newcomer said. “And so cuts like this really have an impact on the work we’re able to do.”

Montana is one of 23 states, along with Puerto Rico, that are eligible for the NIH’s Institutional Development Award program, meant to bolster NIH funding in states that historically have received less investment. Congress established the program in 1993.

The NIH’s grant terminations hit institutions in 15 of those states, more than half that qualify, plus Puerto Rico.

Researchers Can’t ‘Just Do It Again Later’

The NIH’s research funds are deeply entrenched in the U.S. health care system and academia. Rarely does an awarded grant stay within the four walls of a university that received it. One grant’s money is divvied up among other universities, hospitals, community nonprofits, and other government agencies, researchers said.

Erin Kahle, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, said she was working with Emory University in Georgia and the CDC as part of her study. She was researching the impact of intimate partner violence on HIV treatment among men living with the virus. “They are relying on our funds, too,” she said.

Kahle said her top priority was to ethically and safely wind down her nationwide study, which included 418 people, half of whom were still participating when her grant was terminated in late March. Kahle said that includes providing resources to participants for whom sharing experiences of intimate partner violence may cause trauma or mental health distress.

Rachel Hess, the co-director of the Clinical & Translational Science Institute at the University of Utah, said the University of Nevada-Reno and Intermountain Health, one of the largest hospital systems in the West, had received funds from a $38 million grant that was awarded to the University of Utah and was terminated March 12.

The institute, which aims to make scientific research more efficient to speed up the availability of treatments for patients, supported over 5,000 projects last year, including 550 clinical trials with 7,000 participants. Hess said that, for example, the institute was helping design a multisite study involving people who have had heart attacks to figure out the ideal mix of medications “to keep them alive” before they get to the hospital, a challenge that’s more acute in rural communities.

After pushback from the university — the institute’s projects included work to reduce health care disparities between rural and urban areas — the NIH restored its grant March 29.

Among the people the Utah center thanked in its announcement about the reversal were the state’s congressional delegation, which consists entirely of Republican lawmakers. “We are grateful to University of Utah leadership, the University of Utah Board of Trustees, our legislative delegation, and the Utah community for their support,” it said.

Hilliard, of HHS, said that “some grants have been reinstated following the appeals process, and the agency will continue to carry out the remaining appeals as planned to determine their alignment.” She declined to say how many had been reinstated, or why the University of Utah grant was among them.

Other researchers haven’t had the same luck. Kahle, in Michigan, said projects like hers can take a dozen years from start to finish — applying for and receiving NIH funds, conducting the research, and completing follow-up work.

“Even if there are changes in the next administration, we’re looking at at least a decade of setting back the research,” Kahle said. “It’s not as easy as like, ‘OK, we’ll just do it again later.’ It doesn’t really work that way.”

Methodology

KFF Health News analyzed National Institutes of Health grant data to determine the states and organizations most affected by the Trump administration’s cuts.

We tallied the number of terminated NIH grants using two sources: a Department of Health and Human Services list of terminated grants published April 4; and a crowdsourced list maintained by Noam Ross of rOpenSci and Scott Delaney of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, as of April 8. We focused on the first month of terminations: from Feb. 28 to March 28. We found that 780 awards were terminated in total, with 770 of them going to recipients based in U.S. states and two to recipients in Puerto Rico.

The analysis does not account for potential grant reinstatements, which we know happened in at least one instance.

Additional information on the recipients, such as location and business type, came from the USAspending.gov Award Data Archive.

There were 222 U.S. recipients in total. At least 94 of them were public higher education institutions. Forty-one percent of organizations that had NIH grants cut in the first month were in states that President Donald Trump won in the 2024 election.

Some recipients, including the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, are medical facilities associated with higher education institutions. We classified these as hospitals/medical centers.

We also wanted to see whether the grant cuts affected states across the political spectrum. We generally classified states as blue if Democrats control the state government or Democratic candidates won them in the last three presidential elections, and red if they followed this pattern but for Republicans. Purple states are generally presidential battleground states or those where voters regularly split their support between the two parties: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The result was 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states. The District of Columbia was also blue.

We found that, of affected U.S. institutions, 96 were in red or purple states and 124 were in blue states.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Cuts In Federal Funding Shut Down Vaccine Clinics Amid Measles Surge

Cuts In Federal Funding Shut Down Vaccine Clinics Amid Measles Surge

By Bram Sable-Smith and Arielle Zionts and Jackie Fortiér, KFF Health News

More than a dozen vaccination clinics were canceled in Pima County, Arizona.

So was a media blitz to bring low-income children in Washoe County, Nevada, up to date on their shots.

Planned clinics were also scuttled in Texas, Minnesota, and Washington, among other places.

Immunization efforts across the country were upended after the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abruptly canceled $11.4 billion in covid-related funds for state and local health departments in late March.

A federal judge temporarily blocked the cuts last week, but many of the organizations that receive the funds said they must proceed as though they’re gone, raising concerns amid a resurgence of measles, a rise in vaccine hesitancy, and growing distrust of public health agencies.

“I’m particularly concerned about the accessibility of vaccines for vulnerable populations,” former U.S. surgeon general Jerome Adams told KFF Health News. Adams served in President Donald Trump’s first administration. “Without high vaccination rates, we are setting those populations and communities up for preventable harm.”

The Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the CDC, does not comment on ongoing litigation, spokesperson Vianca Rodriguez Feliciano said. But she sent a statement on the original action, saying that HHS made the cuts because the covid-19 pandemic is over: “HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”

Still, clinics have also used the money to address other preventable diseases such as flu, mpox, and measles. More than 500 cases of measles so far in a Texas outbreak have led to 57 hospitalizations and the deaths of two school-age children.

In Pima County, Arizona, officials learned that one of its vaccination programs would have to end early because the federal government took away its remaining $1 million in grant money. The county had to cancel about 20 vaccine events offering covid and flu shots that it had already scheduled, said Theresa Cullen, director of the county health department. And it isn’t able to plan any more, she said.

The county is home to Tucson, the second-largest city in Arizona. But it also has sprawling rural areas, including part of the Tohono O’odham Nation, that are far from many health clinics and pharmacies, she said.

The county used the federal grant to offer free vaccines in mostly rural areas, usually on the weekends or after usual work hours on weekdays, Cullen said. The programs are held at community organizations, during fairs and other events, or inside buses turned into mobile health clinics.

Canceling vaccine-related grants has an impact beyond immunization rates, Cullen said. Vaccination events are also a chance to offer health education, connect people with other resources they may need, and build trust between communities and public health systems, she said.

County leaders knew the funding would run out at the end of June, but Cullen said the health department had been in talks with local communities to find a way to continue the events. Now “we’ve said, ‘Sorry, we had a commitment to you and we’re not able to honor it,’” she said.

Cullen said the health department won’t restart the events even though a judge temporarily blocked the funding cuts.

“The vaccine equity grant is a grant that goes from the CDC to the state to us,” she said. “The state is who gave us a stop work order.”

The full effect of the CDC cuts is not yet clear in many places. California Department of Public Health officials estimated that grant terminations would result in at least $840 million in federal funding losses for its state, including $330 million used for virus monitoring, testing, childhood vaccines, and addressing health disparities.

“We are working to evaluate the impact of these actions,” said California Department of Public Health Director Erica Pan.

In Washoe County, Nevada, the surprise cuts in federal funding mean the loss of two contract staffers who set up and advertise vaccination events, including state-mandated back-to-school immunizations for illnesses such as measles.

“Our core team can’t be in two places at once,” said Lisa Lottritz, division director for community and clinical health services at Northern Nevada Public Health.

She expected to retain the contractors through June, when the grants were scheduled to sunset. The health district scrambled to find money to keep the two workers for a few more weeks. They found enough to pay them only through May.

Lottritz immediately canceled a publicity blitz focused on getting children on government insurance up to date on their shots. Vaccine events at the public health clinic will go on, but are “very scaled back” with fewer staff members, she said. Nurses offering shots out and about at churches, senior centers, and food banks will stop in May, when the money to pay the workers runs out.

“The staff have other responsibilities. They do compliance visits, they’re running our clinic, so I won’t have the resources to put on events like that,” Lottritz said.

The effect of the cancellations will reverberate for a long time, said Chad Kingsley, district health officer for Northern Nevada Public Health, and it might take years for the full scope of decreasing vaccinations to be felt.

“Our society doesn’t have a collective knowledge of those diseases and what they did,” he said.

Measles is top of mind in Missouri, where a conference on strengthening immunization efforts statewide was abruptly canceled due to the cuts.

The Missouri Immunization Coalition, which organized the event for April 24-25, also had to lay off half its staff, according to board president Lynelle Phillips. The coalition, which coordinates immunization advocacy and education across the state, must now find alternative funding to stay open.

“It’s just cruel and unthinkably wrong to do this in the midst of a measles resurgence in the country,” Phillips said.

Dana Eby, of the health department in New Madrid County, Missouri, had planned to share tips about building trust for vaccines in rural communities at the conference, including using school nurses and the Vaccines for Children program, funded by the CDC.

New Madrid has one of the highest childhood vaccination rates in the state, despite being part of the largely rural “Bootheel” region that is often noted for its poor health outcomes. Over 98 percent of kindergartners in the county received the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella in 2023-24 compared with the state average of about 91 percent, and rates in some other counties as low as 61 percent.

“I will say I think measles will be a problem before I retire,” Eby, 42, said.

Also slated to speak at the Missouri event was former surgeon general Adams, who said he had planned to emphasize the need for community collaboration and the importance of vaccinations in protecting public health and reducing preventable diseases. He said the timing was especially pertinent given the explosion in measles cases in Texas and the rise in whooping cough cases and deaths in Louisiana.

“We can’t make America healthy again by going backwards on our historically high U.S. vaccination rates,” Adams said. “You can’t die from chronic diseases when you’re 50 if you’ve already died from measles or polio or whooping cough when you’re 5.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Despite Trump's Hostility To Immigrants, Hospitals Won't Turn Them Away

Despite Trump's Hostility To Immigrants, Hospitals Won't Turn Them Away

By Vanessa G. Sánchez and Daniel Chang for KFF Health News

California is advising health care providers not to write down patients’ immigration status on bills and medical records and telling them they don’t have to assist federal agents in arrests. Some Massachusetts hospitals and clinics are posting privacy rights in emergency and waiting rooms in Spanish and other languages.

Meanwhile, Florida and Texas are requiring health care facilities to ask the immigration status of patients and tally the cost to taxpayers of providing care to immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization.

Donald Trump returned to the White House declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, suspending refugee admissions, and challenging birthright citizenship, or the policy of giving U.S. citizenship to anyone born in the U.S. As he begins carrying out the “largest deportation operation” in the nation’s history, states have offered starkly different guidelines to hospitals, community clinics, and other health facilities for immigrant patients.

Trump has also rescinded a long-standing policy not to arrest people without legal status at or near sensitive locations, including schools, churches, and hospitals. A proposal to formalize such protections died in Congress in 2023.

But no matter the guidelines that states issue, hospitals around the U.S. say patients won’t be turned away for care because of their immigration status. “None of this changes the care patients receive,” said Carrie Williams, a spokesperson for the Texas Hospital Association, which represents hospitals and health care systems in the state. “We don’t want people to avoid care and worsen because they are concerned about immigration questions.”

During Trump’s first term, immigration agents arrested people receiving emergency care in hospitals and a child during an ambulance transfer. Immigration officers in Texas arrested a woman awaiting brain surgery in a hospital in Fort Worth. In Portland, Oregon, officers arrested a young man leaving a hospital, and in San Bernardino, California, a woman drove herself to the hospital to give birth after her husband was arrested at a gas station.

An estimated 11 million immigrants live in the United States without authorization, with the largest numbers in California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, according to Pew Research Center.

Half of immigrant adults likely without authorization are uninsured, compared with fewer than one in 10 citizens, according to the 2023 KFF-Los Angeles Times Survey of Immigrants, the largest nongovernmental survey of immigrants in the U.S. to date. While some states are highlighting health care expenses incurred by immigrants, a KFF brief noted that immigrants contribute more to the system through health insurance premiums and taxes than they use. Immigrants also have lower health care costs than citizens.

Some health care providers fear Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will disrupt their work at health facilities and cause patients, particularly children, to skip medical care. On Trump’s first day, the Republican president issued an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship for children born to a parent without legal authorization or on a visa, which could leave them ineligible for federal health and social programs. The order was immediately challenged by states and a civil rights group.

“You are instilling fear into folks who may defer care, who may go without care, whose children may not get the vaccines they need, who may not be able to get treatment for an ear infection or surgery,” said Minal Giri, a pediatrician and the chair of the Refugee/Immigrant Child Health Initiative at the Illinois chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

A recent survey conducted by the Im/migrant Well-Being Research Center at the University of South Florida found that 66 percent of noncitizens reported increased hesitation in seeking care after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law in 2023 requiring hospitals that accept Medicaid to ask about a patient’s legal status. That’s compared with just 27% for citizens.

“That really was alarming to me to see how this law made people hesitant to go to the doctor, even in an emergency,” said Liz Ventura Molina, a co-author of the survey and report.

In signing the law, DeSantis touted it as “the most ambitious anti-illegal immigration” legislation in the nation. This month, the Republican governor called for a special session of the state legislature to help support Trump’s immigration agenda.

Jackson Health System, a public safety net provider in Miami, said in a statement that quarterly reports to the state don’t contain individual patient information. “We do adhere to all required cooperation with law enforcement agencies, including ICE, as part of any criminal investigations, understanding that privacy laws mandate we only release private patient information through a court-ordered warrant.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Reproductive Health Care Rights

Conservative State Courts Stir Trouble For GOP Legislators On Abortion

Abortion opponents have maneuvered in courthouses for years to end access to reproductive health care. In Arizona last week, a win for the anti-abortion camp caused political blowback for Republican candidates in the state and beyond.

The reaction echoed the response to an Alabama Supreme Court decision over in vitro fertilization just two months before.

The election-year ruling by the Arizona Supreme Court allowing enforcement of a law from 1864 banning nearly all abortions startled Republican politicians, some of whom quickly turned to social media to denounce it.

The court decision was yet another development forcing many Republicans legislators and candidates to thread the needle: Maintain support among anti-abortion voters while not damaging their electoral prospects this fall. This shifting power dynamic between state judges and state lawmakers has turned into a high-stakes political gamble, at times causing daunting problems, on a range of reproductive health issues, for Republican candidates up and down the ballot.

“When the U.S. Supreme Court said give it back to the states, OK, well now the microscope is on the states,” said Jennifer Piatt, co-director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. “We saw this in Alabama with the IVF decision,” she said, “and now we’re seeing it in Arizona.”

Multiple Republicans have criticized the Arizona high court’s decision on the 1864 law, which allows abortion only to save a pregnant woman’s life. “This decision cannot stand. I categorically reject rolling back the clock to a time when slavery was still legal and where we could lock up women and doctors because of an abortion,” state Rep. Matt Gress said in a video April 9. All four Arizona Supreme Court justices who said the long-dormant Arizona abortion ban could be enforced were appointed by former Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who in 2016 expanded the number of state Supreme Court justices from five to seven and cemented the bench’s conservative majority.

Yet in a post the day of the ruling on the social platform X, Ducey said the decision “is not the outcome I would have preferred.”

The irony is that the decision came after years of efforts by Arizona Republicans “to lock in a conservative majority on the court at the same time that the state’s politics were shifting more towards the middle,” said Douglas Keith, senior counsel at the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice.

All the while, anti-abortion groups have been pressuring Republicans to clearly define where they stand.

“Whether running for office at the state or federal level, Arizona Republicans cannot adopt the losing ostrich strategy of burying their heads in the sand on the issue of abortion and allowing Democrats to define them,” Kelsey Pritchard, a spokesperson for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in an emailed statement. “To win, Republicans must be clear on the pro-life protections they support, express compassion for women and unborn children, and contrast their position with the Democrat agenda.”

Two months before the Arizona decision, the Alabama Supreme Court said frozen embryos from in vitro fertilization can be considered children under state law. The decision prompted clinics across the state to halt fertility treatments and caused a nationwide uproar over reproductive health rights. With Republicans feeling the heat, Alabama lawmakers scrambled to pass a law to shield IVF providers from prosecution and civil lawsuits “for the damage to or death of an embryo” during treatment.

But when it comes to courts, Arizona lawmakers are doubling down: state Supreme Court justices are appointed by the governor but generally face voters every six years in retention elections. That could soon change. A constitutional amendment referred by the Arizona Legislature that could appear on the November ballot would eliminate those regular elections—triggering them only under limited circumstances—and allow the justices to serve as long as they exhibit “good behavior.” Effectively it would grant justices lifetime appointments until age 70, when they must retire.

Even with the backlash against the Arizona court’s abortion decision, Keith said, “I suspect there aren’t Republicans in the state right now who are lamenting all these changes to entrench a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.”

Meanwhile, abortion rights groups are trying to get a voter-led state constitutional amendment on the ballot that would protect abortion access until fetal viability and allow abortions afterward to protect the life or health of the pregnant person.

State court decisions are causing headaches even at the very top of the Republican ticket. In an announcement in which he declined to endorse a national abortion ban, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on April 8 said he was “proudly the person responsible” for ending Roe v. Wade, which recognized a federal constitutional right to abortion before being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022, and said the issue should be left to states. “The states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” he said. But just two days later he sought to distance himself from the Arizona decision. Trump also praised the Alabama Legislature for enacting the law aiming to preserve access to fertility treatments. “The Republican Party should always be on the side of the miracle of life,” he said.

Recent court decisions on reproductive health issues in Alabama, Arizona, and Florida will hardly be the last. The Iowa Supreme Court, which underwent a conservative overhaul in recent years, on April 11, heard arguments on the state’s near-total abortion ban. Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed it into law in 2023 but it has been blocked in court.

In Florida, there was disappointment all around after dueling state Supreme Court decisions this month that simultaneously paved the way for a near-total abortion ban and also allowed a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution to proceed.

The Florida high court’s decisions were “simply unacceptable when five of the current seven sitting justices on the court were appointed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis,” Andrew Shirvell, executive director of the anti-abortion group Florida Voice for the Unborn, said in a statement. “Clearly, grassroots pro-life advocates have been misled by elements within the ‘pro-life, pro-family establishment’ because Florida’s highest court has now revealed itself to be a paper tiger when it comes to standing-up to the murderous abortion industry.”

Tension between state judicial systems and conservative legislators seems destined to continue, given judges’ growing power over reproductive health access, Piatt said, with people on both sides of the political aisle asking: “Is this a court that is potentially going to give me politically what I’m looking for?”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Chamath Palihapitiya

The Tech Billionaires Who Are Backing Kennedy's Anti-Science Crusade

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the latest scion of the Kennedy clan to seek the presidency, has a set of unusual fans: some of the most influential tech executives and investors in America. Kennedy’s strong anti-vaccine views are, for this group, a sideshow.

“Tearing down all these institutions of power. It gives me glee,” said one of his boosters in tech, Chamath Palihapitiya, a garrulous former Facebook executive, nearly two hours into a May episode of the popular “All-In” podcast he co-hosts with other tech luminaries. The person who might help with the demolition was the show’s guest, Kennedy himself.

“Me too,” responded David Sacks, Palihapitiya’s co-host on the podcast, an early investor in Facebook and Uber. Sacks and Palihapitiya said they would host a fundraiser for Kennedy, which, according to the Puck news outlet, was set for June 15.

Kennedy’s newfound friends in Silicon Valley were mostly loud supporters of vaccines early in the pandemic, but they have proven more than willing to let him expound on his anti-vaccine views and conspiracy theories as he promotes his presidential bid. During a two-hour forum on Twitter, hosted by company owner Elon Musk and Sacks, Kennedy raised a range of themes, but returned to the subject he’s become famous for in recent years: his skepticism about vaccines and the pharmaceutical companies that sell them.

Indeed, on the June 5 appearance, he praised Musk for ending “censorship” on his corner of social media. A promoter of conspiracy theories, Kennedy said various forces are keeping him from discussing his safety concerns over vaccines, like Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff (as part of the intelligence apparatus), Big Pharma, and Roger Ailes (who has been dead for six years).

Kennedy argued an influx of direct-to-consumer advertising from pharmaceutical concerns keep media outlets, like Fox News, from featuring his theories about vaccine safety. Fox didn’t respond to a request for comment.

He then said he supported reversing policies that allow direct-to-consumer ads in media. (Kennedy earlier dubbed himself a “free-speech absolutist” and, later, in a discussion about nuclear power, a “free-market absolutist” and even later a “constitutional absolutist.” Legal scholars doubt the courts, on First Amendment grounds, would be receptive to a ban of direct-to-consumer ads.)

Support for Kennedy in the venture capital and tech communities, which have a big financial stake in the advancement of science and generally reject irrational conspiracy theories, is likely limited. Multiple venture capitalists and technologists contacted by KFF Health News expressed puzzlement over what’s driving the embrace from Musk and others.

“I think he is a lower-intellect, Democratic version of Donald Trump, so he attracts libertarian-leaning, anti-‘woke,’ socially liberal folks as a protest vote,” said Robert Nelsen, a biotech investor with Arch Venture Partners. “I think he is a dangerous conspiracy theorist, who has contributed to many deaths with his anti-vaccine lies.”

But the ones with the megaphones are letting Kennedy talk. Jason Calacanis, another co-host of “All-In” and a pal of Musk’s, said late in the podcast he was pleased the conversation didn’t lead with “sensational” topics — like vaccines. Still, during the podcast, Kennedy was given nearly five uninterrupted minutes to describe his views on shots — a long list of alleged safety problems, ranging from allergies, autism, to autoimmune problems, many of which have been discredited by reputable scientists.

David Friedberg, another Silicon Valley executive and guest on the show, suggested there wasn’t “direct evidence” for those problems. “I don’t think it’s solely the vaccines,” Kennedy conceded. After an interlude touching on the role of chemicals, he was back to injuries caused by diphtheria shots.

While Friedberg, a former Google executive and founder of an agriculture startup sold to Monsanto for a reported $1.1 billion, pushed back against Kennedy, he did so deep into the podcast, after the candidate had left. Kennedy’s views — on nuclear power and vaccines — manifest “as conspiracy theories,” he said. “It doesn’t resonate with me,” he continued, as he “likes to have empirical truth be demonstrated.”

The muted pushback is a bit of a reversal. Early in the rollout of covid-19 vaccines, many tech luminaries had been among the most loudly pro-shot individuals. The “All-In” crew was no exception. Sacks once tweeted, “We’ve got to raise the bar for what we expect from government”; Palihapitiya begged administrators to “stop virtue signaling” with vaccination criteria and simply mass-vaccinate instead.

That was then. Sacks recently retweeted a video of Bill Gates questioning the effectiveness of current covid vaccines and defended Kennedy from charges of being anti-vaccination.

Musk himself has sometimes suggested he has qualms with vaccines, tweeting in January, without evidence, that “I’m pro vaccines in general, but there’s a point where the cure/vaccine is potentially worse, if administered to the whole population, than the disease.”

Musk isn’t the only top tech executive to signal interest in Kennedy’s candidacy. Block CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has tweeted Kennedy “can and will” win the presidency.

In some ways, the Valley’s interest in Kennedy — vaccine skepticism and all — has deep roots. Tech culture grew out of Bay Area counterculture. It has historically embraced individualistic theories of health and wellness. While most have conventional views on health, techies have dabbled in “nootropics,” supplements that purportedly boost mental performance, plus fad diets, microdosing psychedelics, and even quests for immortality.

There’s a “deeply held anti-establishment ethos” among many tech leaders, said University of Washington historian Margaret O’Mara. There’s a “suspicion of authority, disdain for gatekeepers and traditionalists, dislike of bureaucracies of all kinds. This too has its roots in the counterculture era, and the 1960s antiwar movement, in particular.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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