By Gina Shaw
The CDC has begun restoring some of the deleted information related to HIV that had been scrubbed from the CDC website, according to several media reports, in the aftermath of a President Trump administration order that requires federal agencies to eliminate all references to “gender ideology.” However, as of Feb. 7, access to not only the HIV-related information, but many other CDC pages was spotty, including broken or incomplete links, and many resources remained unavailable.
On Feb. 4, Doctors for America (DFA), a nonprofit organization of physicians and medical students, filed a lawsuit against the CDC and several other agencies in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking reinstatement of these resources in full. It followed that lawsuit with a Feb. 6 request for a temporary restraining order, “(1) requiring Defendants CDC, FDA, and HHS to restore webpages and datasets they have unlawfully removed from their websites; and (2) enjoining CDC, FDA, and HHS from removing or substantially modifying other webpages and datasets in implementation of the unlawful Office of Personal Management (OPM) memorandum on ‘Initial Guidance Regarding President Trump’s Executive Order Defending Women.’”
A hearing on the motion has been scheduled for Monday, Feb. 10.
In the meantime, “the Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System is still down; you can go to the landing page, but many of its sub-pages do not work and data is still missing,” said Reshma Ramachandran, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine, in New Haven, Conn., and a member of the board of directors of DFA. “The data and statistics for adolescent and school health are also not available."
Dr. Ramachandran added that "there are also several clinical pages that we use in our practice that have been removed, such as a guide for the initiation of PrEP [pre-exposure prophylaxis] for the prevention of HIV infection and what needs to be done when you are initiating PrEP across different demographic populations. HIV monitoring surveillance data from around the country is missing as well.”
In response to an inquiry from Pharmacy Practice News and Infectious Diseases Special Edition, the CDC provided the following statement: “All changes to the HHS website and HHS division websites are in accordance with President Trump’s January 20 Executive Orders, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government and Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing. The Office of Personnel Management has provided initial guidance on both Executive Orders and HHS and divisions are acting accordingly to execute.”
President’s Goal to Slash New HIV Infections Now at Risk
“This is horrible news and will greatly impact how people view HIV,” said Anthony Gerber, PharmD, AAHIVP, a collaborative drug therapy management clinical pharmacist in virology and sexual health at Bellevue Hospital, in New York City. “HIV has always had a stigma as a gay man’s disease, and information from the CDC or other government agencies have helped [underscore] that not only gay men get HIV.”
The deleted information resources also convey that HIV “is a worldwide epidemic that effects all people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation,” Dr. Gerber said. “By removing public resources to educate the public, we are going against the mission statement President Trump put out in his first term in office to decrease new HIV infections by 90% by 2030.
“This is truly awful, and it is unfortunate that it is occurring.”
The populations that will be hurt most by these actions are the most vulnerable, Dr. Ramachandran said. “Clinicians and health professionals who work in rural areas, or in nonacademic settings, often don’t have access to these clinical guidelines and other resources in other ways, such as subscriptions to multiple medical journals. I work in a federally qualified health center, and it is only because of my academic affiliation that I can access many journals and the guidelines from those journals.”
The lack of availability of independent information “from a trusted resource like the CDC is really harmful to rural patients, low-income patients and people from underserved minority populations who depend on these clinics,” he added. “Their clinicians will be further hampered in providing them with evidence-based, quality care.”
As noted in our previous coverage, one possible source for at least some of the deleted information is the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (web.archive.org), using this direct URL. A toolbar at the top of the site can be used to navigate back to a recently archived version of the CDC’s page to access resources as they appeared prior to Jan. 31.