NIH earmarks nearly $1.5 million for ‘anti-racist healing in nature’
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) last month earmarked an additional $387,308 in taxpayer funds for a study on “anti-racist healing in nature,” bringing the total to $1,432,387.
According to the NIH’s project description, the study will “aim to reduce embodied stress through increased access to what can be considered a social determinant of health – equitable access to physical activity in public parks.” The grant was issued in 2021 and will end next month.
Under the informal name “From Hood to Woods” researchers from San Francisco State University are offering over $100 to participants who “identify as a person from the latine/x/o [sic], Black, Pacifica [sic] Islander, and/or Filipinx community to participate.”
“Although nature is an ancestral healing place for many communities, these spaces can be unwelcoming, unsafe, or triggering for people of color,” explains the university’s San Francisco State News.
In the project description, the NIH also uses the word “Latinx”, a term considered offensive by most Hispanics.
“The insider researchers come from the communities being recruited to the intervention,” says the NIH. “They are committed to examining the culture of four different communities (Black, Latinx, Pilipinx [sic], and Pacific Islander) to test and institutionalize ideas for systems change as part of transformative research for health equity.”
Republican presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently vowed to “clean out” the NIH and other federal health agencies.
“It’s not about the medicine, it’s about control—they wanted to exercise power over people,” he said. “If you look at all these entrenched bureaucrats at the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration]—they need to be cleaned out, because they totally failed and they’re not advocating for the best interests of the people of this country. It’s been a total disaster.”
DeSantis also did not deny claims made by Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, Jr that if elected, the governor would “burn the CDC and NIH to the ground.”
“There was a report that — I had spoken with Bobby Kennedy Jr., and he had said that ‘the governor said that you know, that we need to burn to the ground the CDC’ and all these things,” DeSantis said.
“And I just want to be very clear, full disclosure—I was not that kind to CDC and NIH and any of those [agencies]. Just for the record, just so your viewers don’t think I’m going soft, but I can’t think of a more catastrophic response than how this country responded to COVID, particularly at the federal level.”
