Both Pfizer and PhRMA funded the Human Rights Campaign’s “Healthcare Equality Index,” a tool that the far-left organization is using to push gender ideology into medical institutions across the nation.
The HRC’s Healthcare Equality Index sways the practices of hospitals and health care facilities by scoring them on whether they are adopting “LGBTQ+ inclusive patient, visitation and employment policies,” the The Washington Free Beacon highlighted in a recent report.
“Over time and due to a decade of advancement in LGBTQ+ inclusion in daily life, health care facilities have worked harder than ever to increase their work to provide equitable care for the LGBTQ+ community,” the HRC boasts, “and now the [Healthcare Equality Index] survey reflects and promotes these efforts through its scoring criteria.”
The Healthcare Equality Index objectives make it clear that to be scored well, health care institutions must prove they are inclusive of LGBTQ patients, cultivating inclusive workplaces by promoting LGBTQ policies and benefits, and engaging publicly with the LGBTQ community.
Inclusivity in those contexts may mean allowing patients or employees to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity, rather than biological sex, or providing access to “gender-affirming care”—a phrase used by activists to mask the grisly realities of transitioning, including hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries to remove or “create” breasts, remove or “create” a penis, facial feminization, and more.
Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., earned a perfect score from the Healthcare Equality Index in 2022, the Free Beacon reported. The index uses a 100-point scale and awards points for things like displaying LGBT symbols, using patients’ preferred pronouns, asking what someone’s preferred pronouns are, conducting LGBT training sessions approved by the HRC, and more.
The index also punishes hospitals that allow “discriminatory treatment that is in conflict with their non-discrimination policy” and requires hospitals to offer the same treatments to treat gender dysphoria as the hospital offers to treat other medical conditions. That means, as the Free Beacon noted, that if a hospital uses puberty blockers to treat early puberty, it also must allow their use for children who “identify” as transgender.
The HRC prominently features both Pfizer and PhRMA as funders: “The HEI was funded in part by generous grants from Pfizer Inc. and PhRMA,” its website says, referring to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a trade group representing companies in the pharmaceutical industry.
Pfizer did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal. In a statement, PhRMA spokesman Brian Newell said that PhRMA supports and works with “a wide variety of organizations to help promote affordable access to health care.”
“Our work with HRC has primarily focused on issues impacting patient access and affordability, including for those with HIV, cancer, and other deadly diseases,” Newell added. “We were not involved in the development or release of this specific project.”
PhRMA declined to answer further questions about possible conflicts of interest.
Asked why hospitals across the country would implement the diversity, equity, and inclusion recommendations, David Gortler, a former senior adviser to the Food and Drug Administration commissioner and current Ethics and Public Policy Center scholar, told The Daily Signal that “hospitals are no longer run by physicians following scientific evidence anymore; non-physician administrators outrank medical doctors in leadership hierarchy.”
“Hospitals are also too administrator heavy, affecting the practice of medicine,” he explained, noting that academia has the same problem. Gortler pointed to the surprisingly faculty-heavy student-teacher ratios at Yale and Harvard. Many of those people in academia and hospitals nowadays have irrelevant degrees, he suggested, and gain their positions through “H.R. departments, which are also fully saturated with leftists” that “keep hiring DEI people in order to force through unscientific policies.”
“It’s a very pernicious way of altering the practice of medicine,” he said. And the new generations of physicians coming into hospitals are “fully pre-indoctrinated by the aforementioned medical school administrators,” Gortler added.
“These are the next generation of pharmacists, physicians, and nurses, and they’re being taught to specifically ignore fundamentals of biology and data-driven findings,” he emphasized. “They’re not following what science is trying to tell us. That’s a really bad problem.”
Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal that Pfizer and PhRMA have turned to an “ideologically driven interest group to do the dirty work” because federal law prohibits them from “directly pushing their dangerous drugs on kids with gender confusion.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“Pfizer and PhRMA are profiting off the broken lives of children who would have come to accept their bodies if only their natural development weren’t interrupted by their drugs,” Severino said. “Yet they continue to pay HRC to bully doctors and insurers into prescribing and paying for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones that are sold with a smile by Pfizer and PhRMA members. These companies have absolutely no shame.”
Jay Richards, director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, similarly told The Daily Signal that “it’s a self-evident conflict of interest for private industry groups and drug companies to fund activist organizations that push ideological ‘medicine’ that creates lifelong patients for the drug companies.”
“But what should we say when those same activist organizations create score cards to reward those same drug companies with good publicity?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s hard to imagine a clearer case of cynicism masquerading as virtue.”
Those familiar with the topic will notice the Healthcare Equality Index’s similarities to the Corporate Equality Index, another Human Rights Campaign initiative thought to be behind Bud Light’s financially disastrous decision to use a biological male who “identifies” as a transgender woman, Dylan Mulvaney, as its public face.
Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, formerly was honored with HRC’s “Best Place to Work for LGBTQ+ Equality” title. But HRC removed Anheuser-Busch from the list and suspended its Corporate Equality Index score over Bud Light’s response to public outrage over its promotion of Mulvaney, a biological man, as a woman.
“We don’t make this decision lightly,” Jay Brown, senior vice president of programs, research, and training at the HRC, told Business Insider, citing the growing number of Republican-led bills protecting children from irreversible sex-change surgeries, banning biological males from women’s private spaces, and prohibiting classroom discussions of sexual topics. The HRC opposes such legislation.
“This is about supporting the current and future workforce, as well as shareholders and consumers,” Brown added. “We’ve seen that when businesses center inclusion in both policy and practice, they come out on top, regardless of baseless, hateful attacks.”
HRC also revealed to Business Insider that it had pressured Anheuser-Busch in late April to release a statement supporting Mulvaney. That move came before the HRC’s subsequent punishment: stripping Anheuser-Busch of its score.
Even Fox News follows the directives of the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, “the nation’s foremost benchmarking survey and report measuring corporate policies and practices related to LGBTQ+ workplace equality.” The Daily Signal reported this week that for the past several years, Fox has received a perfect score on the Corporate Equality Index, and a former Fox News employee also told The Daily Signal that the company frequently mentions its perfect score in employee-training materials.
According to Fox’s company handbook policies on gender transition, Fox News employees are allowed to use restrooms that align with their gender identity, permitted to dress in alignment with their preferred gender, and must also be addressed by their preferred name and pronouns in the workplace.
The HRC did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal.
Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.