Research has the power to save lives, and women have long been overlooked. I am honored and proud to be part of this groundbreaking initiative with President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, which is galvanizing the federal government, the private sector, and philanthropy to improve women’s lives and their health.
This is the culmination of the incredible work over the last year and a half that got done out of this Initiative. Lives have been changed and the work will continue. I’m super proud of what we were able to accomplish and to all the Architects of Change who gathered here today and recommitted themselves to doing more in this space. So that we can hopefully change the stories that women are telling about their healthcare. I’m so proud of what we accomplished. I know there’s a lot more to do, but we will get it done!
At the official White House Women’s History Month event, President Biden signed an Executive Order to initiate the most comprehensive executive actions ever taken to expand and improve research on women’s health.
This is a huge step to accelerate our initiative’s efforts that will ensure women’s health is integrated and prioritized across the federal research portfolio and budget, galvanize new research including studies on women’s health in midlife, and commit $200 million in women’s health research funding for the National Institutes of Health.
It is our moment, it is our moonshot! History has been made, and we are just the beginning.
At the 2024 State of the Union, President Biden announced his plan to dedicate $12 billion in new federal funding to transform women’s health research and benefit millions of lives across America.
I am deeply grateful to have been invited to attend by the First Lady and sit alongside her in the U.S. House Chamber during this monumental moment, and I’m so excited for what’s to come!
For years I’ve been trying to get answers to questions about women’s health. For years I’ve heard the same thing over and over: “We don’t know.” How is it that we don’t know about half of our population? Because we haven’t researched them.
Women have been ignored for far too long in clinical research, but now, the White House is helping us get answers! In a major milestone for the Women’s Health Research Initiative, we announced a $100 million commitment in federal funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) for women’s health research and development.
I am so happy that the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research hit the road! First Lady Jill Biden and I visited the Women’s Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles to hear about the cutting-edge research being done by Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, along with so many other incredible researchers and scientists.
Our goal is to listen to as many women as possible, as many doctors as possible, and as many researchers as possible to identify the gaps in women’s health and to find out what women want and need. This is an exciting venture that I hope will make a huge difference in the lives of women in all parts of the country!
What an honor it was to stand beside President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden in the Oval Office as the first-ever White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research was signed. This is a groundbreaking step forward for women’s health research—it is the beginning of us finally getting some answers on Alzheimer’s, heart disease, menopause, depression, osteoporosis, lung cancer, and more!
It must be federal, state and local policy to fund research that impacts and improves women’s lives. This is a long time coming, and I am immensely grateful to be in the room where and when it happened.
