Doctors were up in arms after a Trump administration directive against “gender ideology” led to the purging of federal webpages containing crucial public health information.
A memo from the Office of Personnel Management dated Jan. 29 provided guidance on President Donald Trump’s executive order pushing back against gender ideology.
“In light of Defending Women, each agency should take prompt actions to end all agency programs that use taxpayer money to promote or reflect gender ideology,” the memo read, instructing agencies to “take down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology” by Jan. 31 at 5 p.m.
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As a result, health websites like those run by the CDC and the National Institute of Health took down pages about HIV, AIDS, and COVID-19. This included guidance on topics such as how doctors should treat sexually transmitted diseases and vaccinate adults.
“These have been deeply disturbing developments,” epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo said in an interview on CNN This Morning Weekend. “This is happening at the direction of politicos, not scientists.”
Nuzzo stressed that public health data is collected to help health agencies identify community needs and to properly allocate “very limited” resources to those who need it most.
“Taking away the data just makes that job harder,” she said. “There’s never been this level of dismantling and tampering data that we’ve seen and it’s deeply concerning and it’s only going to sow distrust in the federal government.”
The Infectious Diseases Society of America similarly described the move to take down HIV- and LGBTQ-related resources from federal health websites as a “deeply concerning” move that “creates a dangerous gap in scientific information and data to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks.”
“This is especially important as diseases such as HIV, mpox, sexually transmitted infections and other illnesses threaten public health and impact the entire population,” IDSA President Tina Tan and Chair Colleen Kelley said in a statement.
David Harvey, head of the National Coalition of STD Directors, told CBS News that “doctors in every community in America rely on these treatment guidelines to know what tests to run, to know what antibiotic will work on which infection, and how to avoid worsening antibiotic resistance.”
Richard Besser, former CDC acting director and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told Politico that “the removal of critical health information from governmental public health sites is chilling and puts the health of the public at risk.”
“While it is natural for administrations to differ in terms of policies, it is highly unusual and should be unacceptable to hide important health information,” he said.
On Friday evening, after its deadline to scrub gender mentions had passed, the OPM said its memo may have been “misinterpreted” to mean that it would shut down websites that would fail to comply.
“That is not the plan for continuing to implement this important effort,” communications director McLaurine Pinover said in a statement.
A group of doctors has come together to archive pages of the CDC website in light of the OPM memo.
