The Body Count of Politics in Science

The Removal of DEI from Research and Medicine Is a Death Sentence for Americans.

To some, the headlines read like triumph. DEI programs slashed across federal agencies. Diversity mandates removed from research funding. Political correctness purged from science. To a certain segment of the American public, and to the politicians who court them, this sounds like progress. It sounds like common sense. It sounds like we’re finally stripping away the frivolous, the wasteful, the ideologically captured nonsense that has supposedly been clogging the machinery of serious science.

They are wrong. And people will die because of it.

I began researching AIDS and HIV in the late 1980s, when the politics of disease was already killing people by the thousands. I saw, up close and in granular detail, what happens when politics infiltrates the laboratory, the hospital, and the research grant. The consequences are not abstract. They are measured in suffering and, at times, death.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding embedded in the anti-DEI movement’s assault on science: the belie…