HHS Encouraged Trans Surgery Whistleblower Crackdown

(Dreamstime)

An official at the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) encouraged a crackdown on whistleblowers who exposed transgender surgeries.

Melanie Fontes-Rainer, director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights, is seen in a July 2023 video encouraging a crackdown on whistleblowers whose leaks were “in the news,” The Daily Signal reported Wednesday.

“We are seeing instances in some of these states where gender-affirming care is being banned where … somebody that works in a facility is taking it upon themselves to disclose information, whether it’s to a state attorney general or a news publication, using this, sort of, so-called whistleblower hat under state law,” Fontes-Rainer says during a public meeting of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, an advisory group to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.

Three days after the meeting, federal agents informed Texas surgeon Eithan Haim he was under investigation for leaking records on sex-change procedures to the news media. Haim since has been charged with four felony counts pertaining to the sharing of share minors’ medical records.

Haim faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted, although the DOJ said it is seeking a monetary judgment.

Late last month, Haim told Newsmax’s “The Chris Salcedo Show” he was being charged because “I told the truth and challenged the dominant political ideology.”

The video cited by The Daily Signal showed Fontes-Rainer saying that transgender-surgery situations make it “really important on the front end to have all the security and privacy controls, who has access to the data, why do they have access to the data … that’s what we can regulate.”

“Reeducating [healthcare] providers is really important right now” because “these are,” she added, “things that people did not anticipate having to talk about with staff or trying to face, and I think we’re seeing it more and more.”

The HHS Office for Civil Rights enforces medical privacy laws of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which protects private medical information.