As health data disappear from government websites, experts push back
Trump administration directives to purge government websites of information related to certain topics—such as “gender ideology,” reproductive rights, and diversity, equity, and inclusion—have resulted in the disappearance of thousands of web pages and datasets.
Roughly 8,000 pages were taken down from government websites, according to a Feb. 2 New York Times article—although some pages have since been reinstated. Information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes, and scientific research have been removed, as well as information about many other topics, according to the Times.
Members of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health community are among those who argue that this purge will harm public health in a number of ways, such as by eliminating access to crucial health information used by clinicians and patients, and by concealing data used widely by health researchers.
“This has international ramifications—it distorts the science base,” said Nancy Krieger, professor of social epidemiology, in a Feb. 4 article in The Guardian. “Science is disappearing from U.S. websites, the work of government-sponsored science is disappearing, the datasets are disappearing.” She added, “If you’re going to do replicable, reproducible science, you need access to the data. You need to have the data from the past.”
Quoted in a Jan. 31 New York Times article, Krieger said, “There’s been a history in this country recently of trying to make data disappear, as if that makes problems disappear. But the problems don’t disappear, and the suffering gets worse.”
Krieger helped lead a “datathon” on Jan. 31—a rush to download and save data from federal websites, including information on LGBTQ+ issues, racism, climate change, and health equity. Another Harvard Chan researcher—Ariel Beccia, an instructor in the Department of Epidemiology who conducts research related to youth, race/ethnicity, sex/gender, and sexual orientation—was also involved. She focused particularly on saving information from the Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System, a large repository of information about young people.
“This is really a crisis,” Beccia said in a Jan. 31 Boston Globe article. “It’s a systematic dismantling of a huge portion of our public health system.”
Jonathan Gilmour, a Harvard Chan School data scientist who researches the health impacts of climate change, helped preserve a website that helps identify communities at particular risk from climate change called the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. In a Jan. 31 article in The Journalist’s Resource, he said, “In my lifetime, in the United States I don’t know of another situation where researchers have been this concerned about losing access to data that they’ve had access to their whole career. It’s dire.”
Read The Guardian article: CDC webpages go dark as Trump targets public health information
Read New York Times articles:
Health Resources Vanish Following D.E.I. and Gender Orders
Thousands of U.S. Government Web Pages Have Been Taken Down Since Friday
Read the Boston Globe article: Critical data on disease transmission, LGBTQ+ health vanishes from government websites
Read The Journalist’s Resource article: Researchers rush to preserve federal health databases before they disappear from government websites
