Maria Shriver speaks in partnership with Jill Biden to promote gender equality in medical research: it’s not political, it’s a ‘human issue’

Maria Shriver says her work for gender equality in medical research is a “human issue,” not a political one.

“I don’t see it as partisan because there are Republican women serving. Republican men came from Republican women,” Shriver said.

“I don’t even see it as a political issue. I see it as a human issue,” said the NBC News correspondent and founder of the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement (WAM) Prevention and Research Center at the Cleveland Clinic.

Jill Biden joined Shriver and top investigators Wednesday at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in downtown Washington to highlight improved research into women’s health.

Biden recalled how she and Shriver met at the White House and how the former first lady of California “exposed a problem that was so simple but so often ignored: that women’s health is understudied and research is underfunded. And many of our medicines, our treatments and medical textbooks are based on men.”

“This has created gaps in our understanding of conditions that primarily affect women, affect only women, or affect men and women differently, causing women to seek health care in a medical world largely designed for men,” Biden told court hearing.

Shriver told ITK her goal is to change the conversation around women’s health care. It’s a mission she discovered after first focusing on Alzheimer’s disease — and learning that it disproportionately affects women — following her father, Sargent Shriver’s, diagnosis in 2003.

“Looking at what was happening to middle-aged women,” Shriver said, “there was no research, there were no facts, there was no script.”

In his State of the Union address in March, President Biden praised the launch of the White House’s first initiative on women’s health research, calling on Congress to approve his $12 billion plan to “transform research in women’s health and benefit millions of lives across America.” .”

Now, Shriver said, it is up to Congress to “give us the $12 billion the president asked for,” which could “correct the decades of lack of investigation.”

Lawmakers, Shriver said, can “level the playing field because that’s what we need.”

Shriver, the 68-year-old niece of the late President John F. Kennedy, added: “We are 51 percent of the population and women’s health concerns and issues are different.”

“So we really need to fundamentally understand that men and women are different, and so it’s not that women are more important, but we just don’t study women in the same way that we study men.”

At Wednesday’s event hosted by WAM and the Women’s Health Research Society, Shriver helped award grants to researchers whose “groundbreaking work will further address the disproportionate impact of Alzheimer’s disease on women by examining the role of biology, genetics and lifestyle unique to a woman.” Cleveland Clinic’s WAM has funded more than $5 million for 48 studies over the years, according to the group.

In 2018, Shriver revealed that she had changed her voter registration from Democrat to Independent, saying at the time that the “divisive nature of our politics has always been problematic” for her.

Shriver said he’s still an independent: “For me, it’s been a way to talk to members of all parties in a different way.”

“People always think I’m a Democrat,” she said. But in conversations with medical researchers and clinicians, Shriver said, she is not interested in “what their political views are.”

“I’m really adamant about focusing on the things we agree on, as opposed to the things we disagree on,” she said.

Shriver praised the president at an event last month, saying he is someone who “respects” women and understands them. Asked what it would mean for women if Biden doesn’t win re-election in November against former President Trump, Shriver responded: “I think it will be difficult.”

Shriver praised Biden for signing an executive order expanding government initiatives focused on women’s health, including $200 million in new funding, calling it “historic and transformative.”

“If you want this to continue,” Shriver said, “you have to vote for local, state and federal people who also believe in fixing this situation and leveling the playing field.”

“My theme is always how can we advance ourselves and humanity?” Shriver said. “We don’t do it where we just advance a part. And so I’m very adamant in everything I do to try to talk about how we can come together and how we can move an issue forward together.”