Continuing the series of updates on things the Trump administration has been doing to attack our health and wellness, for the weekend edition we have:
4. Attacking our access to scientific data and information
Remember when I said that the Trump administration was throwing up their hands and restoring websites they had removed (after losing legal battles, of course), saying “We’re not even going to fight this. We’re just going to put everything back”? And I also said I’d be proceeding with caution? Well yeah. At least 22 websites have been totally taken down again, including about preventing drug overdoses, health equity for people with disabilities, and the risk of Clade 1 Mpox for gay and bisexual men (especially concerning now that California has identified community transmission of that very dangerous strain).
Not to mention this shortlist of federal data that the Trump administration has tampered with, including the only national survey dataset dedicated to monitoring adverse pregnancy outcomes; the Census Bureau’s QuickFacts website, which usually lists population estimates by state or county and allows people to look at census data stratified by age, sex, race, and other demographics (it says it’s “undergoing maintenance” but has looked like this since August); the website for an initiative between 15 federal agencies that create national climate assessments; the Office of Personnel Management’s FedScope Database, which provides information about federal workforce demographics but now has had its race and ethnicity modules completely removed , and it’s undergoing maintenance to change its use of “gender”; and the disappearance of a 2024 study from the Department of Justice website that showed that US domestic terrorists are most frequently right-wing extremists.
If that’s not enough for you, there’s a leaked memo showing that the research division at the USDA is not allowed to use more than 100 words in its publications, including…wait for it… “safe drinking water.” Just to round out this dystopian recounting of all the information the Trump administration doesn’t want us to have, HHS has indefinitely put on hold a website from the CDC that would make case counts on 127 notifiable conditions available in one place. The work is done and ready to launch, but approval hasn’t been provided. It was supposed to be a “one-stop shot for all notifiable conditions, searchable by state,” making it easy for public health officials to monitor the spread of infectious diseases that could be putting us at risk.
Why would HHS want to block user-friendly access to this information, you might ask? Knowledge is power, my friends. The less we have access to data, the less sure we can be about where health disparities are persisting. The less we have the data we need to recognize when some people are worse off, the less we are able to focus our resources on helping make sure everyone has the same chance at being healthy. “Health equity” and “health disparities” have become dirty words in this administration, because they want resources spent protecting people who look like them, act like them, and have money like them. Period.
So what can we do about it? Some public health professionals are creating shadow organizations that work to share information and guidance even when the federal government won’t. Some examples of this are the West Coast Health Alliance and the Northeast Public Health Collaborative, where states are bonding together to issue binding public health recommendations instead of following the feds. The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) launched the Vaccine Integrity Project in April, as a rival to ACIP (which we know we can’t trust anymore). And as a last example for today, the New England Journal of Medicine and CIDRAP announced this past Tuesday that they will begin publishing a new journal called Public Health Alerts as an alternative to CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, or MMWR. This one hits especially hard to me, as an avid reader of the MMWR since I first learned about it in 2002 back when I was getting my Master of Public Health. Since 1952, the weekly publication of the MMWR has been the way thousands of public health professionals learn about new outbreaks or emerging diseases. But since Trump took office, weekly editions have been missed for the first time in its 73 years, and the former editor-in-chief resigned saying that MMWR staff were being pressured by the administration to change the way it reports information. Not to mention that earlier this month, most of the MMWR staff received notices they were being RIFd, only to have those notices rescinded hours later.
Bottom line? We can’t trust information coming out of our federal government anymore, so we need to find alternative ways to communicate important information. This is the United States in 2025, folks. It’s not good.