WASHINGTON, D.C.—The health of American citizens, and more particularly that of those in the adult entertainment industry, was dealt a blow earlier this month when the National Institutes of Health, a division of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), sent a letter to the University of California, San Francisco warning that its $2 million contract for research involving fetal tissue, previously renewed for a year at a time, would be extended for only 90 days and might then be canceled.
The letter is only the latest salvo in HHS's religious war on the use of fetal tissue in medical research, after the department announced last September that it would be canceling a contract with a company named Advanced Bioscience Resources Inc. (ABR) to procure fetal tissue for federal medical research projects. The excuse? HHS claimed that ABR had not "sufficiently assured [HHS] that the contract included the appropriate protections applicable to fetal tissue research or met all other procurement requirements."
That's a big problem, because fetal tissue is used to create what are known as humanized mice: genetically engineered mice who, through the use of the tissue, develop immune systems that mimic those of human beings, thus allowing the researchers to test new medicines and vaccines on human immune systems without requiring the use of actual human beings.
And of course, at least some of that research is directed toward a cure for HIV. In fact, ABR had been supplying fetal tissue to the HHS subsidiary National Institute of Health's Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) in Montana, which had been using humanized mice to test potential HIV therapies. Similarly, the Gladstone Center for HIV Cure Research in San Francisco, which has also relied on RML's humanized mice for its research, was unable to obtain sufficient test subjects for its research, thanks to the ABR contract cancellation.
"What happened in September was that my NIH collaborator at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories [Kim Hasenkrug] was informed that he could no longer order fetal tissue from the sole source supplier, ABR, and so we [were told that we] could complete the [initial] experiment that [had already been set up], but in science you need to do multiple experiments," explained Warner Greene, the director of the Gladstone Center. "You can’t depend upon one experiment to see whether it’s repeatable, etc. So essentially this ban on fetal tissue stopped the line of investigation."
Coincidentally [sic], as The New York Times reported yesterday, "in September, a coalition of anti-abortion groups wrote to H.H.S. Secretary Alex Azar to denounce the [ABR] contract, saying, 'It is completely unacceptable to discover that the F.D.A. is using federal tax dollars and fomenting demand for human body parts taken from babies who are aborted.'
"Around the same time, 85 Republican members of Congress wrote a letter to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, head of the F.D.A., stating, 'Unborn children are not commodities to be bought and sold. The practice of conducting research using the body parts of children whose lives have been violently ended by abortion is abhorrent.'"
For roughly the past four years, the Religious Right has waged a war against the use of fetal tissue—generally a byproduct of abortions—in medical research, claiming variously that the tissue was sold without the permission of the woman who underwent the abortion, and that abortion providers (most notably Planned Parenthood) were making huge profits by selling the material. That latter claim gained national attention after religious activist David Daleiden released highly edited footage of secret recordings he and his confederates made of meetings with Planned Parenthood personnel.
But conservatives generally take Daleiden's videos as gospel, and one such conservative is Alex M. Azar II, a former pharmaceutical lobbyist and drug company executive who was installed as the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) on January 24 of this year, after that post was left vacant for more than a year through the resignation of Trump pal and former Sen. Tom Price, who was forced out after it was revealed that he had expended more than $1 million of department funds for his own travel on private charter jets and military aircraft.
Interestingly, just six days before Azar's confirmation, Acting HHS Secretary Eric Hargan had ordered the creation of a "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division" within the federal Office for Civil Rights, which would "specialize in enforcement of and compliance with laws that protect conscience and free exercise of religion, and that prohibit coercion and discrimination," according to the far-right legal group Liberty Counsel.
Just what that Conscience and Religious Freedom Division has been doing for the past 11-plus months is unclear, but its mandate is to give doctors, hospitals and other medical providers official, legal cover if they decide to refuse to treat people who are gay or transgender, or who are seeking any abortion-related, self-sterilization or assisted suicide services. According to The Hill newspaper last February, "More than 300 individuals filed a complaint with the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department over the last month, saying that their religious or conscience rights have been violated by their employer, a state or state agency or a health provider."
According to law blogger Elie Mystal, one such religious objector was a nurse in Wisconsin who, citing religious objections, refused to get a flu shot, even though she worked in a nursing home and even though one of the primary killers of the elderly is the flu. Similarly, political journalist Amanda Marcotte reported on Salon.com that on May 2, "three organizations—the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association—joined together to sue the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Population Affairs for drastically rewriting its Title X funding priorities to grant awards to programs that favor abstinence programs over contraception provision. ... The administration has also revamped the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs (TPPP) to discourage contraception use in favor of 'just say no' lectures."
But regarding the ban on use of fetal tissue, the Times also reported that "64 academic and medical organizations weighed in with a letter to leaders of the House and Senate defending the research. That group included Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford, Johns Hopkins and other major universities, as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"'Fetal tissue research has been critical for scientific and medical advances that have saved the lives of millions of people, including the development of vaccines against polio, rubella, measles, chickenpox, adenovirus, rabies, and treatments for debilitating diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, cystic fibrosis, and hemophilia,” the group said in its letter, adding, "cells in fetal tissue have unique and valuable properties that often cannot be replaced by other cell types."
As things stand now, HIV research is at a virtual standstill, and until HHS's policies change, those suffering from HIV are out of luck in terms of benefiting from the search for a cure.
Illustration of HIV virus courtesy of STD-GOV.org.
