Dr. Charity Oyedeji is a board-certified hematologist—that is, a doctor specializing in the study of blood and blood disorders—and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Duke University. Oyedeji is the recipient of multiple research grants and co-author of more than 35 peer-reviewed publications. Her employers at Duke Health, the umbrella organization uniting the university’s healthcare and medical education systems, have recognized her “superb abilities as a physician and scientist.”
Oyedeji’s primary research focus is sickle cell disease, a genetic blood disorder that causes red blood cells in the body to take on a sickle-like shape. When in this state, it becomes much more difficult for the cells to pass through blood vessels, which leads to blood flow blockages. Further complications of sickle cell disease include chronic fatigue, chronic pain, proneness to infections, stroke, and dramatically decreased life expectancy.
There are about 100,000 people living with sickle cell disease in the United States, and more than 90,000 of them are Black. It naturally follows that research into the disease is of especial importance to the Black community. Oyedeji, a Black woman, has lost multiple members of her own family to the disease.
Recently, and tragically, Oyedeji has become known to the wider non-medical world not for her sickle cell disease research, but because of callous and senseless actions undertaken to undermine it.
Last month, the National Institutes of Health terminated a five-year, $750,000 research grant that had been previously awarded to Oyedeji. The grant went toward the upkeep of Oyedeji’s Sicklefit Exercise Program, a physical therapy program for older, sickle cell-affected adults that seeks to improve their quality of life. The reason for the grant’s termination? Simple: The federal government doesn’t believe that Black lives matter enough to open its wallet.
According to the NIH, whose parent company is the conspiracy theorist-headed Department of Health and Human Services, Oyedeji’s research is based “primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories” such as “amorphous equity objectives,” and was “funded under an ideologically driven DEI program under the Biden Administration.”
On the same day that Oyedeji learned her grant was being terminated, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that hundreds of similar NIH terminations were illegal and evidently discriminatory. US District Judge Matthew Young said that throughout his career he had “never seen government racial discrimination like this.”
The only ideology driving Oyedeji’s work is the ideology underpinning scientific inquiry and medical advancement. The truly “ideologically driven” party in this travesty is of course the white supremacist federal government perpetrating it, a prejudicial force driven by the ideology of division and domination.
When improving quality of life, delivering life-saving aid, keeping American citizens on American soil, and preventing suicide become “political” issues, we have no choice but to conclude “politics” is euphemistic. “Politics” is merely a stand-in for the racist, classist, xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic Trumpian philosophy. So is anything pretending to promote “freedom,” “patriots,” or an “America First” focus while deliberately promoting the opposite. As clumsy, craven, and calumnious as ever, the fascists in charge have once again tipped their heinous hand.
Featured image/photo by Francisco Venâncio on Unsplash.