CNN Retracts Fact-Check over Trump’s Transgender Mice Claim

Following President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, CNN attempted to issue a fact-check on his claim of government spending on experimentation with transgender mice; the network was subsequently forced to make a retraction.

As the Daily Caller reports, President Trump revealed during the speech – his first address to Congress as the 47th President – that his administration had uncovered $8.2 million in funding at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to use “gender-affirming” treatments on mice. CNN’s Deidre McPhillips tried to claim this was false, and that only about $500,000 was spent on these experiments.

“Trump falsely claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency identified government spending of ‘$8 million for making mice transgender,’” said CNN’s original statement.

The White House responded by issuing a statement confirming that the original amount of $8.2 million was accurate.

“Last night, President Donald J. Trump highlighted many of the egregious examples of waste, fraud and abuse funded by the American taxpayers, including $8 million spent by the Biden Administration ‘for making mice transgender,’” the statement from the White House declared. “The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).”

The statement included a full list of all NIH grants that provided funding for such experimentation on mice. This included $3.1 million to study the role of hormones in mediating sex influences in asthma, $2.5 million on studying the reproductive effects of hormone therapy, and $1.2 million on studies regarding “androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis.” Smaller amounts included $735,113 on studies analyzing the impact of hormone therapy on mouse microbiomes, $455,000 to study “gender-affirming hormone therapy on HIV-vaccine induced immune responses,” and $299,940 on studying the risks of breast cancer in testosterone therapy. All experiments were conducted on mice.

After the White House rebuttal, CNN updated its fact-check statement by changing the summary from “Trump falsely claimed” to “This claim needs context.”