The Trump administration has doubled down on the bizarre (and false) claim that the previous government spent millions of dollars to make mice trans.
During an address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday (4 March), Trump claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency had found $8 million (6.2 million) set aside by Joe Biden’s administration to make mice transgender.
“This is real,” the president claimed, during a speech which better resembled one of his campaign rallies.
It was, in fact, not real. CNN fact-checkers have clarified that, between 2021 and 2022, $477,121 (370,000) was set aside for research into how feminising hormones can affect the immune system, which involved tests on monkeys.
However, the White House has now repeated the claims in a press release, calling CNN’s fact-checkers “fake news losers,” and proclaiming that “president Trump was right (as usual)”.
Trump’s claim seems to focus on research papers, one of which received $3 million (2.3 million) funding and examined how “sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms controlled by hormones” might contribute to asthma. Another study, which received $1.2 million (930,000), used transgenic – not transgender – mice.
Other projects included a $2.5 million (1.9 million) fertility study and a $300,000 (233,000) analysis of breast cancer risks for trans men, which used mice in clinical tests.
A transgenic mouse is one that has had its genome altered for the purpose of studying gene...
Sahara Ray has now denied false claims she made against her fiancé during what she described as an 'episode' that has seen her enter hospital. The Australian model, whose father is surfing legend T...