LWVAC is launching a "What You Can Do" (WYCD) campaign where we share a series of action plans. With so much happening on the national stage, these action plans are intended to encourage you to respond to the daily breach of the rule of law and the separation of powers. Read more about this campaign here. Skip to the current action by clicking here.

CURRENT TOPIC:  Reduction in NIH Funding for Medical Research

Fewer U.S. children are dying from cancer today than ever before. The same is true for U.S. men with prostate cancer and for women with breast cancer. The more than 70-year history of collaboration between the US government and the nation’s universities and other institutions is a major reason why more of us, young and old, are surviving and prospering into our 80s, 90s and sometimes even longer.

The present administration has now thrown this collaboration into chaos. The decision to limit the funding that research universities and hospitals use to fund equipment and supplies, maintain their research buildings and fund the personnel to monitor spending to guarantee that money is being spent carefully and lawfully has halted some research and made all researchers unsure of their ability to deliver the improved, safe, and effective evaluations and treatments they promised to the government and to the American people.

The temporary suspension of the administration’s actions in selected states only intensifies the chaos.

If you or people you know have survived cancer, traumatic brain injury, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, or other life-threatening disease, you and they did so because of medical research. Elected officials need to hear our stories of survival. They need to know that we want the same or even better outcomes for future generations.

If you or people you know are anxiously awaiting treatments for conditions now considered untreatable such as Alzheimer’s disease, then our elected officials need to know that abrupt, ill-considered disruptions in funding for medical research are unacceptable and could be politically risky at election time.

If you or people you know are being told that these disastrous funding decisions are going to save taxpayer money, elected officials need to know that thoughtful citizens do not believe it. Universities and other institutions affected by these reductions will have to limit or discontinue some essential services or those states who value health research will have to provide at least some portion of the funding. Or some institutions will either stop or severely limit medical research with the potential result that the cost of treating disease will increase. This administration’s thoughtless reduction in research funding will merely shift costs rather than reduce them, and taxpayers and the sick and disabled among them will still be responsible for covering these costs.

The White House has called resistance to the reductions in medical research funding “hysteria.” We need to let our representatives know that we are not hysterical. We are outraged. We are outraged because this cruel reduction in funding makes it less likely that future generations in North Central Florida will take hope from announcements like this:

UF Health is now the first site in the southeastern United States to house a groundbreaking device that will provide personalized cancer treatment by combining extremely detailed magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, with precision radiotherapy. This has an incredible quality of life and economic impact, not just for the patients themselves, but also for our health care system as a whole.

CURRENT ACTION: Call your legislators and let them know how you feel and why.

Some suggestions for your message follow. We want our messages to be laser focused on threats to the NIH funding of medical research. Feel free to use some or all these suggestions translated into your own words.  As always, be respectful and brief as possible.