MEDPAGE Today – “Trump administration’s HHS back to targeting public health resources deemed too woke. Censorship is back at the CDC, Inside Medicine learned, from an active agency employee who listed nearly two dozen websites that are now offline. Many of the 22 removed sites appear to have been taken down recently, having been online as recently as earlier this month, an Inside Medicine analysis revealed. Some of the sites may have been removed within the last few days, while others may have been offline for far longer, but flew under the radar. In some cases, agency staffers have been specifically instructed to remove websites, I was told. Others were discovered by employees in the course of their work, such as a seemingly random respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) surveillance page that is now offline. The complete list of censored CDC websites, however, is anything but random. A list of links to removed CDC websites as of September 20 can be found at the bottom of this column…Overall, this latest action appears to be yet another angle in the administration’s ongoing attack not only on our public health infrastructure, but on the mission-critical work carried out by CDC employees. “The agency is so compromised and the scientists are [held] hostage,” Demetre Daskalakis, MD, told Inside Medicine when shown the list. Daskalakis recently resigned as the director of the CDC National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. He has spent the last several weeks advocating for beleaguered scientists who remain in the agency and, more broadly, for a return to rigorous science within HHS….Here are the websites that we found to be offline, as well as some indication of when they were last seen live. This means that those websites were last live no less recently than the given dates (“last snapshotted”), but in some cases the websites may have been removed more recently, but we do not know…”

See also KFF – Disappearing Federal Data: Implications for Addressing Health Disparities. “Data are a cornerstone for efforts to improve health and health care, including addressing disparities. Federal data can act as “essential infrastructure,” with policymakers and institutions relying on demographic, geographic, and health outcomes data, among others, to make important decisions around resource allocation. Data are important for identifying health status and needs, including disparities; directing efforts and resources to address needs and disparities as they are identified; assessing the impacts of policy changes; and establishing accountability. Without adequate data, health needs and disparities may remain unseen and unaddressed. Further, lack of reliable and transparent data can erode public trust in government institutions, negatively impact willingness to participate in future federal data collection efforts, and make policy implementation challenging…”