CNN edited a fact-check of President Donald Trump’s joint session address to Congress claiming he “falsely” said money was spent for transgender experiments.
CNN backtracked on one of its fact-checks of President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress after claiming he “falsely” asserted federal money was used on transgender experiments with mice.
CNN journalist Deirde McPhillips asserted that Trump “falsely claimed” Tuesday night that the Department of Government Efficiency identified $8 million that was spent on “making mice transgender.”
Instead, she argued that grants were given to projects that applied hormone therapy to monkeys to understand its effects on HIV treatment.
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“Between the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, the National Institutes of Health awarded a total of $477,121 to three projects that involved administering feminizing hormone therapy to monkeys to understand how it may affect their immune system and make them more susceptible to HIV. Feminizing hormone therapy is a gender-affirming treatment used to block the effects of the male hormone testosterone and promote feminine characteristics among transgender women,” McPhillips wrote in a draft obtained by Wayback Machine.
The fact-check continued, “Transgender women are nearly 50 times more likely to be infected with HIV than other adults, according to one study from 2013 across 15 countries, including the US. It’s not clear where the $8 million figure came from.”
However, an edited version of the fact-check changed the assertion on Wednesday from “falsely claimed” to “needs context,” adding the White House had since put out a list of federal grants involving mice receiving gender-transition treatments.
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“The White House list made clear what Trump, in the speech, did not: The studies were meant to figure out how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them, not for the purpose of making mice transgender,” the fact-check now reads.
The fact-check also includes a correction reading, “An earlier version of this item incorrectly characterized as false Trump’s claim about federal money being spent for ‘making mice transgender.’ The article has been updated with context about the spending, which was for research studies on the potential human health impacts of treatments used in gender-affirming care.”
Fox News Digital reached out to CNN for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
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DOGE announced on Wednesday that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has since canceled seven grants, some of which included $532,000 to “use a mouse model to investigate the effects of cross-sex testosterone treatment” and another $33,000 to test “feminizing hormone therapy in the male rat.”