The long-drawn-out process of science can mean that work is published in a very different world than when it was conceived. That helps explain how research on the health impact of structural racism that was led by the National Institutes of Health came to be published on Friday, even as the Trump administration has cancelled and challenged the value of such work.
The work on the paper, which attempts to quantify the impacts of structural racism on cardiovascular disease across the United States, was started several years ago, when there was a “a real eagerness to engage in this conversation,” said Zachary Dyer, a family medicine physician and a co-author. But it is being published in a very different political environment as the Trump administration has attacked work it deems related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Several of the paper’s authors are scientists at the NIH, whose director has in recent months discredited research on structural racism as “ideological” and “unscientific.”
