Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed once dismissed the push to fund breast cancer research as a product of "social power and privilege", a position that clashes sharply with his current campaign trail attacks on Republicans for allegedly cutting cancer funding.
In a 2012 essay titled "The Pink Ribbon Lobby and Everyone Else," El-Sayed argued that federal dollars flowing to breast cancer research represented a "disturbing" trend driven by well-connected advocacy groups rather than by the actual burden of disease. The essay, published in the 2x2 Project, a journal sponsored by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, where El-Sayed worked as an epidemiologist, framed breast cancer funding as an equity problem, claiming it came at the expense of research into diseases affecting people with less political clout.
The Washington Free Beacon reported on the essay's contents as El-Sayed campaigns for a Michigan Senate seat against Republican Mike Rogers. El-Sayed's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
El-Sayed's essay opened with a swipe at the breast cancer advocacy movement's public visibility. He noted that the George Washington Bridge had been adorned with pink lights and that the Michigan Wolverines football team wore "pink cleats and arm bands." He treated these displays not as signs of genuine public concern but as evidence of a lobby's outsized reach.
"The breast cancer lobby has done an incredible job raising my 'awareness' of Breast Cancer. If I weren't an epidemiologist, it would have me believing that the women around me were in imminent danger."
El-Sayed did acknowledge that breast cancer is "an incredibly important disease" and that the social focus on it "is warranted." But the essay's central argument cut the other direction: "the reallocation of public funds disproportionately to breast cancer is certainly not."
He leaned on a study published in the American Sociological Review that examined lobbying by "single-disease interest groups," with particular attention to breast cancer and HIV/AIDS advocacy organizations. El-Sayed used the study to argue that breast cancer's share of federal research money reflected political muscle, not medical need, and that the result was inequity in health research funding.
The numbers tell a different story about the disease's severity. Breast cancer strikes roughly one in eight American women over a lifetime. It is the second leading killer of women in the country, behind only heart disease. Approximately 322,000 Americans receive a breast cancer diagnosis each year, and about 42,000 die from it. In 2012, the year El-Sayed wrote his essay, breast cancer killed more than three times as many Americans as HIV/AIDS.
El-Sayed's essay also made a curious editorial choice. Though the American Sociological Review study he relied on covered both breast cancer and HIV/AIDS lobbying, El-Sayed singled out only the breast cancer organizations for criticism, omitting HIV/AIDS groups from his analysis entirely.
The essay matters now because El-Sayed has built a central plank of his Senate campaign around defending cancer research funding. He has accused Elon Musk of "gutting" cancer research through the Department of Government Efficiency, positioning himself as a champion of the very federal health spending he once called inequitable. He has also expressed interest in serving on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which oversees the budget for the National Institutes of Health, the main source of federal funding for disease research.
That committee's ranking member is Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, described as a longtime El-Sayed ally. Sanders has his own history of controversial statements about breast cancer. An essay he authored, which resurfaced during his 2020 presidential campaign, linked the disease to women's sexual repression.
Sanders wrote:
"The manner in which you bring up your daughter with regard to sexual attitudes may very well determine whether or not she will develop breast cancer, among other things. How much guilt, nervousness have you imbued in your daughter with regard to sex?"
El-Sayed's framing of breast cancer as a disease of "social power and privilege" and Sanders's pseudo-scientific musings about sexuality and cancer make for an awkward pair of would-be stewards of federal health research policy.
El-Sayed's record beyond the essay raises its own questions. In 2019, eight female employees at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where El-Sayed briefly worked, named him in a gender and age discrimination lawsuit filed against the school and its director. The complaint alleged El-Sayed told a 41-year-old female colleague he refused to work with "anyone over 40." He also reportedly told the woman he had furnished his office with "very high-end furniture" purchased with "leftover grant money" obtained while at Columbia University.
The lawsuit's allegations sit uncomfortably alongside El-Sayed's progressive branding. A candidate who frames breast cancer research funding as a privilege problem, and who campaigns as a champion of equity, was accused by eight women of contributing to a discriminatory workplace. El-Sayed's campaign has faced sustained scrutiny from Republican rival Mike Rogers over a range of resurfaced statements and associations.
His rhetoric toward women in his own party has drawn fire as well. During the Democratic primary against Rep. Haley Stevens, El-Sayed called her "the least capable candidate in America" and said she was unable to "string two coherent sentences together." Stevens's supporters accused him of sexist rhetoric.
El-Sayed's campaign has already weathered questions about his mosque imam's eulogy of a Hamas leader and about his own resurfaced remarks on post-9/11 U.S. actions. The breast cancer essay adds a domestic policy dimension to a pattern of past statements that keep surfacing at inconvenient moments.
El-Sayed refers to himself as "Dr. El-Sayed" in political ads, trading on his medical credentials. But his 2012 essay did not read like a doctor worried about patients. It read like an academic more interested in the sociology of advocacy than in the women facing a disease that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year.
The controversy also raises questions about the broader pattern of associations and statements that Michigan voters will weigh as they decide who represents them in the Senate.
Voters in Michigan deserve a senator who will fight for cancer research without first running it through an ideological filter. El-Sayed's own words suggest he sees the disease through a lens of grievance politics, and that should concern every family in the state touched by breast cancer.
