Under Investigation For Exposing Medical Records of Trans Youth in Texas, a Doctor Cries Victim
Eithan Haim, who released private patient records to a right wing think tank claims that ideological capture of mainstream medical organizations began with efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
A former resident at Texas Children’s Hospital, Eithan Haim is under federal investigation in Texas for releasing the private medical records of transgender youth to a conservative think tank. Ethan Haim is currently doing the rounds of conservative media and raising funds after leaking records of youth treated in Houston’s Texas Children’s Hospital to activist Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute. The documents contained no evidence of any illegal or unethical conduct by TCH staff.
Long before Texas banned gender-affirming care for youth last June, providers of healthcare for trans youth were already under pressure to stop offering this care. Several of the highest-quality multidisciplinary programs in Texas buckled under pressure, shuttering clinics and leaving families and patients in need of treatment high and dry. One such program, at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, announced it was ending services in March of 2022. However, a few doctors are alleged to have continued seeing a handful of patients with gender dysphoria after the announcement that such treatment would cease. That’s what was alleged by far-right activist Chris Rufo in May, when he released medical records purporting to show that a few patients had continued to receive puberty blocking implants, most replacing a pre-existing implant the child already had, after the cutoff date.
The leak was not widely noticed outside the far-right media swamp, although Assigned Media covered it at the time. We reported that Rufo’s City Journal had released an interview with the person who supplied the records, and quoted a passage where he had to go outside and cry because he sensed a “demonic presence” at his workplace due to trans youth being treated there.
Federal law protects patient records from being accessed, misused, and publicized. Merely redacting patient names is not, contrary to misinformation being widely circulated by the right-wing press, sufficient to allow any hospital staff member to release any patient record they’d like for any reason. Concerns were therefore raised over the circumstances of the Manhattan Institute leak, with Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee releasing a statement calling for an investigation by TCH, and for information concerning a potential legal breach to be passed on to Federal enforcement agencies.
The records released by Haim did not include the names of patients. However the did include highly specific information such as age, sex, doctor’s name, diagnosis, and the date and exact time of their procedures. This sort of information would easily allow a patient to recognize themselves, and it could potentially allow someone who knew a patient of a certain age saw a particular doctor at a particular time and date to infer what that patient’s diagnosis and the purpose of their visit was. In other words, the information constitutes a serious breach of privacy, even with a redacted name.
Federal authorities seem to have taken notice of the potential for this breach to have violated the law in June of 2023. Now, right-wing press are in full-on defense mode, circling the wagons around a doctor who leaked records for the cause. The whistleblower has come forward and identified himself as Eithan Haim in recent days, and is pushing a fundraiser to conservative audiences.
Haim describes himself as a resident who was completing his training at TCH. A Daily Wire story on the federal charges whose headline whines “The Feds Are Trying To Ruin His Life” includes the detail that Haim accessed the records of youth diagnosed with gender dysphoria through Epic, which stored “clinic and operating room schedules” at TCH, and released those records to Rufo. According to his fundraising page, which we’ve chosen not to link to, Haim says he’s under criminal investigation by the federal government for “a case involving ‘medical records.’”
screenshot from Eithan Haim’s fundraiser, not linked
In an on-camera interview with Haim, Rufo falsely referrs to TCH as having a “child sex change program” and accuses doctors who inserted reversible puberty blocking implants as “cutting up kids.” This is a reference to the implantation of fully reversible puberty blocker releasing devices which halt the release of sex hormones for a period of months.
When asked by Rufo to describe how he came to the “first inkling that something was wrong,” Haim described conservative media reports denigrating programs for trans youth at Vanderbilt and Boston Children’s Hospital, rather than anything he observed himself. The Daily Wire story is more specific, describing Haim as crediting that outlet’s misleading, inflammatory coverage of Vanderbilt hospital with radicalizing him against gender-affirming care.
Haim’s fringe beliefs on gender-affirming care are far from the only he holds. In his interview with Rufo, he links mainstream support for gender-affirming care to precautions to fight COVID-19, claiming that both COVID-19 precautions and gender-affirming care are “ideological” rather than evidence-based. He harshly criticizes Dr. Anthony Fauci as “someone I wouldn’t let take care of my goldfish” and decries as “censorship” the attitude that people who questioned mainstream COVID-19 recommendations (which included things like social distancing, masks, and vaccinations) were harming public health.
The apparent links between fringe anti-vax beliefs that developed during the COVID-19 emergency and fringe anti-trans beliefs are intriguing and do not seem to have been previously investigated by the press. A recent story in the Washington Post described the ways that vaccine misinformation was promoted by Florida’s top public health official and the ties between such misinformation and the presidential campaign of Ron DeSantis. DeSantis and Florida have also been leaders in the campaign against gender-affirming care for youth.
