Standard Deviation EP5: Damage Done
Episode 5 of Standard Deviation with Oliver Bogler on the Out of Patients podcast feed pulls you straight into the story of Dr Ethan Moitra, a psychologist who fights for LGBTQ mental health while the system throws every obstacle it can find at him.
Ethan built a study that tracked how COVID 19 tore through an already vulnerable community. He secured an NIH grant. He built a team. He reached 180 participants. Then he opened an email on a Saturday and learned that Washington had erased his work with one sentence about taxpayer priorities. The funding vanished. The timeline collapsed. His team scattered. Participants who trusted him sat in limbo.
A federal court eventually forced the government to reinstate the grant, but the damage stayed baked into the process. Ethan had to push through months of paperwork while his university kept the original deadline as if the shutdown had not happened. The system handed him a win that felt like a warning.
I brought Ethan on because his story shows how politics reaches into science and punishes the people who serve communities already carrying too much trauma. His honesty lands hard because he names the fear now spreading across academia and how young scientists question whether they can afford to care about the wrong population.
You will hear what this ordeal did to him, what it cost his team, and why he refuses to walk away.
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