The call to action came as Harvard announced it would not comply with new demands from the Trump administration, with president Alan Garber saying the school would not “negotiate over its independence or its constitutional rights.”
The letter to MGB’s leadership marks the first time the state’s largest health system has gotten public pressure from its employees to resist federal funding threats.
“Appeasement has never been a successful strategy, and it is not one now,” the employees said in the letter, which organizers began circulating via e-mail on Friday. “Institutions that comply with these demands are not spared — they are only asked to give up more. What does our mission mean — what do our values truly mean — if we comply instead of standing up for what is right?”
Dr. Marjorie Curran, a pediatrician at Mass General for Children who helped write the letter, said she has no doubt that leaders of the state’s biggest health system want to preserve its mission. But she feels they have been conspicuously silent in the two weeks since the Trump administration announced it was reviewing $9 billion in federal funding to Harvard and then issued a list of demands.
“The stuff that [the Trump administration is] doing is directly threatening public health and is going to be causing death,” Curran said in an interview. “We need to be yelling from the rooftops that this needs to stop.”
MGB is the largest private employer in the state, with about 82,000 workers. Its flagship hospitals, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, last year together received more than $1 billion in funding for research from the National Institutes of Health. Such financial support hangs in the balance as a result of the Trump administration’s ultimatum and a move by the government in February to cap overhead costs to recipients of NIH grants.
Curran said the letter went to Dr. Anne Klibanski, chief executive of MGB; Dr. David Brown, president of MGB’s academic medical centers; Dr. Marcela del Carmen, president of MGH; Dr. William Curry, chief medical officer of the academic medical centers; and Dr. O’Neil A. Britton, chief integration officer of MGB.
MGB didn’t have an immediate response to the letter, according to Jessica Pastore, a spokesperson for the health system.
The Trump administration said on March 31 it was reviewing federal funding for Harvard and its affiliates in an effort to “root out antisemitism,” according to the government’s antisemitism task force.
The task force issued a list of demands three days later, including ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, implementing “merit-based” admissions and hiring practices, cooperating with federal immigration authorities, and changing student disciplinary procedures. The task force didn’t give Harvard a deadline.
Trump and his allies contend the measures will help combat antisemitism on campus. They allege that Harvard failed to protect Jewish students from harassment during pro-Palestinian protests.
However, the letter, titled an “MGB Call to Action,” said the demands are antithetical to the four stated pillars of the health system: patient care, cutting-edge research, education of the next generation of health care providers, and advocating for the communities MGB serves.
“Rather than preemptively concede to executive orders that threaten our mission, we must mount a coordinated and courageous opposition,” the letter said. “If we stand together — with our clinical and academic colleagues across the country — we can withstand this existential threat.”
The letter said MGB must make it clear that it welcomes all patients and employees, regardless of race, gender, gender identity, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, or economic status.
That flies in the face of the demands of Trump’s antisemitism task force. It said that DEI programs teach people to “make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes” and should be shuttered.
The letter sent Monday also said MGB should defend the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Without naming anyone, the letter referred to past public statements by the nation’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that measles shots could cause autism and that vitamins might protect people from the virus.
“An administration that promotes vaccine skepticism, revives debunked claims linking vaccines to autism, and recommends vitamin A for a disease declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 must be called to account, and all clinicians should be free to do so,” the letter said.
The vast majority of employees who signed the letter were physicians, but signatories also included nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, and social workers.
Dr. Scott Hadland, chief of adolescent medicine at Mass General for Children and an expert on the treatment of addiction, said he signed it because he wants his patients and their families to know what MGB’s values are.
“I especially want the communities we serve here in Boston and New England to know that we are committed to eliminating health disparities, whether they’re related to race, ethnicity, nationality, LGBTQ+ community membership, or socioeconomic status,” he said in a text message.
In addition to urging MGB to enlist other teaching hospitals in a fight against the Trump administration, the letter called on leaders to “file any needed legal challenges.”
On Friday, two groups representing Harvard professors sued the administration in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, saying the threat to cut billions in federal funding for the university violates free speech and other First Amendment rights. The suit was filed by the American Association of University Professors and the Harvard faculty chapter of the group.
The letter sent to MGB leaders quoted Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which he said, “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
Read the full letter from MGB employees below:
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at [email protected].
