The Lancet: “Authors are self-censoring”

Editorials published by the BMJ Group and The Lancet stress that it is imperative for the scientific community not to shy away from confronting Donald Trump’s “harmful policies”

Rodrigo de Oliveira Andrade

After withdrawing the USA from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Climate Agreement, American President Donald Trump has now begun imposing a series of restrictions on scientific activity and the autonomy of federal regulatory agencies and institutions, including the country’s leading biomedical research funding agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Just days after taking office, Trump ordered the suspension of grant application reviews, canceled workshops and meetings, froze travel, and banned researchers from publishing reports and press releases or contacting the press, adding that future presentations by NIH staff at meetings or conferences must be approved beforehand by a presidential appointee.

Even uploading preprints (articles not yet peer reviewed) to online repositories has been suspended.

“It’s hard to understand what danger preprints and unreviewed manuscripts pose to the US—or how a partial gagging order on scientists puts the health and well-being of people and the planet first. How does it even put ‘America First?’” asked Kamran Abbasi, editor in chief of the BMJ Group (British Medical Journal), which publishes several renowned medical journals, in an editorial published on January 30.

A day later, news broke that researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been officially instructed not to publish scientific reports or papers containing “forbidden” terms deemed problematic by the Trump administration, such as “gender,” “LGBT,” “transgender,” “diversity,” and “inclusion.”

An email sent to researchers on January 31 by Sam Posner, director of the CDC’s office of science, even included a draft text prepared specifically for them to use when requesting retractions for articles containing such terms that had already been submitted to scientific journals.

Several databases and websites offering guidance on vaccines, viruses, and sexually transmitted diseases have been taken offline “for review,” to ensure that they do not violate US federal government guidelines.

In an editorial published on February 4, Kamran Abbasi and Jocalyn Clark, an international editor at the BMJ Group, urged researchers and scientific publications not to bow to Trump’s measures, which they called censorship. “It is absurd that the scientific record be treated with such disregard,” they wrote.

“This amounts to the censorship of scientists, breach of rights to free expression, dehumanization of LGBT individuals, and indifference for the American taxpayers and human beings worldwide who support the CDC’s research and have a right to expect that the findings be shared,” wrote Abbasi and Clark.

At the scientific journal The Lancet, the impact has already been felt. “Reviewers are declining and authors are self-censoring,” they wrote in an editorial published on February 8.

“Researchers’ ability to work has been severely limited or stopped altogether. Free speech is restricted,” the text says, adding that it is imperative that health institutions do not allow themselves to be intimidated and that they confront Trump’s harmful policies.

“Health institutions may be hesitant to criticize the new administration publicly, but this timidity is a mistake. Trump’s actions must be called out for the damage they are doing.”

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