CDC staff ordered to stop working with WHO
Some data and webpages taken down by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal health agencies to comply with President Trump’s executive order remained offline Thursday, after a judge ordered health officials to put some back online.
Agency officials had scrambled last month to scrub all mentions of “gender” from their websites, taking down anything that could not be easily rewritten.
That prompted a lawsuit by the nonprofit Doctors for America, which secured a federal court ruling to temporarily restore the list of webpages that the group had cited in their filings by the end of the day on Tuesday.
However, access to federal health resources on several topics not specifically mentioned by the group has not been restored, like the CDC’s recommendations on who should be vaccinated for mpox during the ongoing outbreak, which remains offline.
The ruling this week by Judge John Bates said federal agencies have until Friday to restore access to any other resources that members of the doctors group say they “rely on to provide care” that were removed without notice.
Some datasets the group’s members said they needed, like a CDC survey of mental health and chronic disease in high school students, were accessible again by Thursday.
But an online tool to navigate results from a similar dataset overseen by the agency about adults, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, was still offline.
Researchers rely on that survey’s results to compare a number of health trends across different states and communities, including rates of cancer screening, obesity rates and women’s health issues.
Webpages mentioning “gender” on other health agency websites also remain offline. The Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion’s “Healthy People 2030” database of goals tracked by federal health authorities also remains partially offline.
Pages about data on transgender people, like goals to reduce bullying of transgender students or increase the national surveys that include data on transgender people, remain inaccessible.
The FDA’s posts on how it was easing restrictions for gay men to donate blood also remain offline, after they were taken down last month. The agency’s final guidance to blood banks can still be found by searching the FDA website, but it has been quietly scrubbed of all mentions of gender.
“Maintaining a safe and adequate supply of blood and blood products in the U.S. is paramount for the FDA, and this proposal for an individual risk assessment, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, will enable us to continue using the best science to do so,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf had said in a now-deleted announcement from 2023 about the change.
Alexander Tin is a digital reporter for CBS News based in the Washington, D.C. bureau. He covers federal public health agencies.
