Trump health info blackout shocks providers

The blackout shook health researchers and providers and raised the specter of the Trump administration limiting what public health information Americans can see.

• The information affected included CDC guidelines for treating sexually transmitted infections, used to know what tests to run and lay out treatment plans, said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
• Without access, "people will get sick. And, especially in cases like congenital syphilis where you cannot lose a day to treat, babies will die," he said in a statement. The information has since reappeared.
• Another affected website is used by clinicians to select birth control after a recent pregnancy. It helps rule out risky options if a patient has a heart condition or even is breastfeeding, physician and public health researcher Jeremy Faust wrote on Substack.

State of play: A New York Times analysis found that more than 8,000 webpages across federal websites, including 3,000 from CDC, had been removed since Friday afternoon.

• Data sets also disappeared: More than 2,200 data sets came offline between President Trump's inauguration and Friday afternoon, according to tallies compiled from data.gov, a repository of publicly available federal data, and the Internet Archive.

Some had been restored as of Sunday.

• The CDC's website for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which hosts vaccine recommendations for kids and adults, went down on Friday evening but was back online by Saturday.
• But references to COVID-19 vaccine and pneumococcal vaccine recommendations approved during ACIP's October meeting that appeared on a version of the recommendations page captured before Trump's inauguration appear to have been removed.
• CDC webpages now have a banner noting that the website is being modified to comply with new executive orders.

The CDC said in a statement that all changes to the Health and Human Services websites are in accordance with President Trump's executive orders that called for an end to federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs and that declared the government will only recognize two sexes, male and female.

• "The Office of Personnel Management has provided initial guidance on both Executive Orders and HHS and divisions are acting accordingly to execute," CDC said.

Scientists, journalists and others who rely on HHS data sets rushed to save data last week, anticipating some of it would disappear. The pace accelerated when word began circulating that the administration would take down government websites not in compliance at the close of business on Friday.

• The Arizona Public Health Association urged its members to download key information from federal websites.
• "If you use these resources, don't assume they'll still be there next week or that some archive website will have captured and preserved them — download and save them now before it's too late," the association wrote in a memo released Wednesday.
• Members of a top advisory board to the CDC also sent a letter to the agency's acting director asking for an explanation of the removal of public health data, Stat reported.
• Nine out of 12 public health researchers and scientists on the board signed the letter, and they expect to be fired for doing so, they told Stat.

The data blackout came after Trump ordered the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization, signed executive orders targeting transgender health care, and halted many external communications from HHS.

• A freeze on grants and other federal funding also paralyzed state Medicaid agencies and some health providers until a federal judge halted it.

💭 Our thought bubble: The full extent of changes to federal health information and data may not be know for some time. If the Trump administration removes gender, race or other demographic categories from data sets, it could fundamentally change the data.

April Rubin contributed