The country’s leading authority on health and wellness has gone woke. Billions of dollars a year are allocated to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in hopes of finding treatments and cures for serious medical issues like cancer and diabetes. the NIH declares itself “the nation’s medical research agency, supporting scientific studies that turn discovery into health” on its website. But move over cancer – the NIH has a new focus for its research: “systematic racism and inequities,” which include such issues as LGBTQ health and how the black community suffers from lack of sleep over racism.
During the Obama administration, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities got an upgrade from center to institute. And, in 2020, the “social determinants of health” category was created as part of a list of illnesses. Now, with a stronger focus on race and gender identity “illnesses,” NIH was awarded $47.5 billion in the 2023 omnibus budget: That’s about $2.5 billion more than ten years ago.
NIH Researching How Poor Sleep Is Caused by Racism
Apparently, insomnia is caused by white privilege and supremacy, and Dr. Alexander Tsai at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has been granted more than $1 million to study this. The research hypothesizes that poor sleep issues are “thought to be explained partially by experiences of interpersonal racial discrimination.” Or, to be more specific, according to the grant summary, “The central hypothesis is that police use of deadly force on unarmed black Americans leads to unhealthy sleep among other black Americans in the general U.S. population.”
Mike Gonzalez, an expert on racial issues at the Heritage Foundation, disagrees with these projects, saying:
“The fact that NIH is doing this is very worrisome. 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.”
Gonzalez argued that there are a lot of other issues that could cause disparities, but only those related to racial discrimination by whites and police officers are being explored. He explained further:
“It assumes that there is structural racism. It assumes that the disparities are caused by structural racism and not a panoply of other reasons. There could be many, many hundreds of reasons why these disparities exist. That is the main problem with critical race theory … the disparities are real, but then it says well, the disparities are prima facie evidence that structural racism exists …. It’s not binary. There are decisions that people make. There are bad schools. There are problems with family formation.”
(Photo by Dina Rudick/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Tsai, who was granted $460,656 in 2020, $439,970 in 2021, and $273,625 in 2022 (for a total of $1.17 million in taxpayers’ money), admitted that his research doesn’t look at other issues that could cause poor sleep, such as lifestyle choices. But then, according to him, those choices also could be because of racism. In other words: No matter how you slice it, it’s racist. But, he claims, “the study seems neither unsubstantiated nor grounded in racial ideology. And, given the public health significance, it falls well within the purview of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, so neither would it be a poor use of taxpayer dollars.”
There are many reasons that a person can suffer from insomnia. The National Library of Medicine website released results of its study of people with a sleep disorder. “Chronic insomnia was seen in 33% of the adult population sampled,” the report stated. “Increasing age and diabetes were significantly associated with insomnia, while other socioeconomic factors and co morbidities were not significantly associated.”
The Office on Women’s Health website pointed out that women are much more likely to suffer from lack of sleep than men. “More than one in four women in the United States experience insomnia, compared with fewer than one in five men. In one study, women of all ages reported worse sleep quality than men, including taking longer to fall asleep, sleeping for shorter periods of time, and feeling sleepier when awake.”
To be fair, a lot of research results on the internet claim the black community suffers more from lack of sleep than others, but, as Gonzalez pointed out:
“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. 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.”
LGBT Community Gets Its Research Too
In 2012 and 2013, NIH spent $432,000 on a study of the Grindr app for gay men to find partners or “encounters.” As Fox 28 pointed out, “The study pledged to ‘investigate the process by which MSM [men who have sex with men] 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.”
Now, for 2023, a grant for $614,775 was issued to study an “HIV prevention intervention into a widely-used geosocial app for Chinese [men who have sex with men].” According to the news outlet, “The funds would be used to prevent the spread of HIV in China via outreach through a romantic hookup app ‘to help individuals understand when they should be using certain prevention services, and to make accessing services less burdensome.’”
Should our tax dollars be spent on these kinds of research when so many people suffer from cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and other serious health problems? Should millions be shelled out to prove the black community can’t sleep because of whites and cops, or to see how gay men interact and find hookups on dating apps?
