GENERAL MEDICAL LITERATURE
In this section, we offer commentaries on a broad survey of recent articles in the English literature. The articles are mostly chosen for two reasons: their potential translational value for immediate clinical practice or their ability to help determine where clinical practice might evolve. Today's topics are of general medical interest.
First, some updates on prior publications:
Trump DOJ issued dismissal of all charges against Eithan Haim, MD
In the preceding January-February issue of this VOICE, we reported that a surgical resident named Eithan Haim, MD, 34, was wrongly targeted by President Biden’s DOJ and was facing a potential decade-long federal prison sentence for revealing that Texas Children’s Hospital had lied when claiming it had stopped performing gender transitions for children.
As we pointed out in an earlier article, the absurd allegation was that Haim violated patient privacy laws. There, of course, was no breach of privacy in Haim going public with the revelation that the hospital’s announcement of a moratorium on transgender care for children had been fake news. He was simply a whistleblower for what is right in medicine but contradicted the Biden administration’s political position on gender-affirming medical care for children. How the Biden administration’s DOJ responded to him is just one more example of how politicized this DOJ, under Secretary Merrick Garland, had become and how much it was willing to deviate — in pursuit of perceived political opponents — not only from what was legal but also from what, in this medical case, had to be considered ethical. And imagine, Secretary Garland almost became a Supreme Court justice under President Obama.
As The Free Press reported on January 24, 2025, Haim received notice that day, at approximately 2:30 pm, that Trump’s DOJ had dismissed all charges against him with prejudice, meaning that charges could not be refiled. Though we expressed the hope in last month’s article that something like this might happen once the Trump administration took over, and though Haim expressed the opinion that, “we took on the federal Leviathan and won,” it must, at least in one aspect, be viewed as a Pyrrhic victory. Though he raised over $1.2 million in crowdfunding, he and his wife incurred over $2 million in legal expenses, and, as The Free Press reported, he predicted that “they would be paying legal bills for 20 years” (1).
More than putting their political opponents in jail, economic bankruptcy is the real primary goal of the weaponization of the judicial system, as we have witnessed since the Obama administration under Attorneys General Eric H. Holder Jr. (also called “Obama’s enforcer”) and Loretta Lynch, continuing to previously unprecedented degrees during the Biden administration under Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Reference
1. Yoffe E. The Free Press. January 24, 2025. https://www.thefp.com/p/eithan-haim-we-took-on-the-federal
Under pressure from the Trump administration, universities retreat from DEI and antisemitism, - or do they?
As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, universities are following industry and Silicon Valley in allegedly (see explanation below) retreating from DEI. According to The Journal, they have started suspending certain research projects, canceling selected conferences, and closing DEI offices on campuses in efforts not to “run afoul” of executive orders from the new Trump administration, which require “the termination of all discriminatory programs” (1).
At risk are enormous government subsidies. The table below lists the universities that lead in NIH funding. As the article pointed out, this kind of federal funding is absolutely critical for research universities.
We purposely inserted the word “allegedly” above because, as John Mac Ghlionn recently noted in an opinion article in The New York Post, from the private sector to academia, DEI isn’t dying but — with the same anti-achievement consequences — only rebranding (2). This is usually achieved by merging DEI units and their staff into other program entities or, simply, renaming the unit, with purposes and goals remaining exactly the same.
If we had to guess which leading university will feel the hammer of the Trump administration first, our strong suspicion would be Columbia University in NYC. What is still going on at that campus even these days is almost unbelievable. As The Free Press reported, the university, for example, promoted an event at a Columbia literary society called Alpha Delta Phi (ADP), which had turned the society’s two-story building into an exhibition space for a demonstration project in support of Hamas, describing the whole exhibit as a “museum of terror” (3). The exhibit specifically offered a spread of tools and the plans for the violent break-in by students (and others) into Hamilton Hall — a seminal event during the initial “occupation” of the university campus by pro-Palestinian supporters. In a speech at the event, a speaker called for a “Zionist-free New York City.”
But that is, of course, not all. The university announced that one of its faculty members, Professor Joseph Andoni Massad, would, in 2025, teach a course on Zionism at the university.
And who is this gentleman?
He is a Columbia professor of Jordanian descent, specializing in Middle Eastern studies, and is part of a long lineage of Columbia academics over almost half a century who have been outspoken supporters of Palestinian terrorism against Israel. His formal position is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.
While that in itself raises questions about his qualifications for conducting a class on the subject of Zionism, he has publicly described Israel as a racist state that has no right to exist and — as a historian — has denied that Jews in the diaspora have historical roots in the Levant.
Great choice, Columbia!
This appointment also seems to have been the last straw for Professor Avi Friedman, an award-winning faculty member in Columbia’s business school, who, in protest, submitted his resignation from the faculty in a scathing letter to Katrina Armstrong, the current President of Columbia University (4).
And he minced no words, noting, among other things, the following: “The university’s decision to appoint Massad to teach a class on Zionism represents a complete abandonment of academic integrity and unbiased scholarship. This appointment was not an oversight — it means a deliberate choice that aligns with the university’s ideology. While freedom of speech is fundamental, it must be accompanied by accountability, particularly when professors openly celebrate violence.” He went on, “Your statement regarding Massad’s conduct was both inadequate and disingenuous. His comments were not mere slip-ups that, as you said, ‘created pain for many in our community and contributed to the deep controversy on our campus.’ Rather, they represent his consistent worldview, one he continues to promote through interviews, podcasts, and articles. He stands as a celebrated figure in the intifada movement — a status that Columbia now continues to endorse.”
And then there is, of course, Harvard University, which, prior to the Trump administration’s takeover of government, quickly reached a settlement regarding two Title VI civil rights lawsuits leveled against the school, promising to implement the “strongest” protections of Jewish students against antisemitism on campus (5). Rumors, however, suggest that this settlement has not let Harvard off the hook when it comes to investigations by the Trump Justice Department. Other universities, including, of course, Columbia, but also Northwestern, the University of Minnesota, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Portland State, among others, are also supposedly being investigated.
Steven Davidoff Solomon, a very prominent law professor at Berkeley, recently published an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal decrying the unchecked antisemitism at his university. This time, he directly and publicly asked President Trump “to investigate his campus because of its hostile environment for Jews and women, thereby violating Title VI” (6). Examples of discrimination he noted included, for instance, the inclusion in a list of lectures that students must attend at the university to be eligible for a course grade better than a B, which included a lecture denying any sexual assault by Hamas operatives on October 7, 2023. Moreover, the article also alleged that professors in even non-political subject areas, like computer science, have launched into antisemitic outbursts against Israel in some of their lectures.
REFERENCES
1. Subbaramian N, Belkin D. The Wall Street Journal . Updated January 31,2025. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/trump-dei-ban-federal-funding-higher-education-8ae81c40; In print, February 2, 2025. pA3
2. Mac Ghlionn J. New York Post, February 2, 2025, p36
3. Sulkin M. The Free Press. January 6, 2025. https://www.thefp.com/p/Columbia-university-anti-Israel-museum-of-terror?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
4. Schwalb J. The Washington Free Beacon. February 3, 2025, https://freebeacon.com/campus/columbia-business-school-professor-resigns-citing-pro-hamas-colleague-joseph-massads-course-on-zionism/
5. Zhukovsky N. New The New York Sun. Updated January 21, 2025. https://www.nysun.com/article/a-watershed-moment-harvard-settling-antisemitism-lawsuit-promises-to-implement-strongest-protections-of-jewish-students
6. Davidoff Salomon S. The Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2025. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/mr-trump-investigate-my-campus-hamas-rape-denial-hostile-environment-for-jews-and-women-politics-77dec881
Zuckerberg no longer believes in “fact-checkers” and – maybe – “experts”
So, after first claiming that his companies were not censoring, the Meta chief now threw the hammer at the Obama and especially the Biden administration, practically claiming that government officials forced his companies into censoring what the government did not want the public to see or hear. And to prove how “newborn” he was, he also announced that his companies would do away with “fact checkers.”
But the term “fact checker” has changed since the advent of social media. In the good old days, when legacy media still ruled, we were all used to getting calls from fact checkers after we had given an interview: Was our name spelled correctly? Were our titles correct and complete? Did we really say so-and-so? And that was it; the fact checker checked whether the facts as writers noted in an article were correct.
But this is not what Zuckerberg’s “fact checkers” (we, therefore, on purpose, put them in quotation marks) and even “fact checkers” in many legacy media these days are doing: They don’t call you; they don’t have to because they are “experts” who, therefore, already know what “real” or “fake” facts are. They don’t even have to ask; they know better anyhow!
Does that sound familiar? Of course, it does because we have repeatedly in these pages attacked the excessive importance given to experts in medicine. An article in the recently reborn New York Sun therefore is not surprising, but still seems a little far-fetched when the author tries to make the point that “Zuckerberg’s rebuke of so-called ‘fact checkers’ reflects a power shift away from experts” (1).
That does not mean that we – and it seems high time – do not indeed perceive a power shift away from experts; but that appears to have more to do with Anthony S. Fauci, MD, requiring a prospective pardon from President Biden for all the lies he presented to the American people during COVID-19, than with “fact checkers” at Facebook.
Reference
1. Barone m. The New York Sun. https://www.nysun.com/article/zuckerberg-rebuke-of-so-called-fact0checkers-reflects-power-shift-away-from-experts