The National Institutes of Health (NIH) received roughly $50 billion for medical research funding from Congress’ recent $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill. However, move over diseases and pandemics; that was so in 2020.
The Center Square reports “a closer look at the agency reveals that NIH is increasingly spending its time, and funds, on equity and LGBT issues as well as ‘systemic racism and inequities.” In 2020, the agency created a new category for research called social determinants of health.”
The category became an avenue to funnel millions of dollars through grants. The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities was “upgraded” from a center to an institute during the Obama administration. “We all have a responsibility to correct systemic racism and inequities,” NIH says on its website.
“The fact that NIH is doing this is very worrisome,” said Mike Gonzalez, an expert on racial issues at the Heritage Foundation. “This is actually a danger now, the fact that it is entering medicine because these are life and death issues, and if we are going to be making these decisions based on these hocus pocus ideas of [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] in order to satisfy some virtue signaling that our government seems to be at this point completely suffused with, we are going to start putting people’s lives in danger.”
“This idea that the way to deal with the disparities that we have is not by addressing root causes but by addressing outcomes is bizarre,” Gonzalez said. “Equity has become the functional opposite of equality. It just means that we are going to treat people differently according to their race in order to affect outcomes.”
One example of what the NIH spends taxpayer dollars on, which caused controversy, includes:
NIH spent $432,000 on a study of Grindr, an app for gay men to find romantic and sexual encounters in 2012 and 2013.
The study pledged to “investigate the process by which MSM use smartphone applications to find sexual partners (i.e., who they look for, how they present themselves, how they communicate, extent of safer sex negotiation, and disclosure)” as well as “investigate the sexual and emotional states (e.g., more/less urgency, arousal, impulsivity)” the men experience when using the apps to see how it affects sexually risky behavior.