Trump’s data deletions pose a stark threat to public health

In just the first few weeks of his second presidency, Donald Trump has taken an axe to the US government’s stockpiles of health data. Sweeping changes have been made to federal websites, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

This weekend, the New York Times reported that more than 8,000 pages across more than a dozen government websites had been taken down in the previous two days. “The purges have removed information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research, among many other topics,” it said.

The BBC reported that references to LGBTQ+ health, and information on certain vaccines had been scrubbed from federal websites, while KFF said several large datasets had been taken offline. (Some have come back carrying the message that they will be modified to comply with executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion and recognising two sexes, male and female.) Those most affected will be those who are most vulnerable.

Why does this matter? Because when public health information is away from the public eye, we are being denied vital details about life-and-death issues.

Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer prize winner and director of the Knight Science Journalism programme at Massachusetts Institute for Technology, describes Trump’s changes as a “complete shutdown of public health and other scientific information, a move to rewrite the evidence [and a] failure to adequately inform the US public”.

While she says this isn’t the first US government to withhold information – “The George W Bush administration suppressed information on climate change results. Obama was not nearly as transparent on environmental issues as many of us hoped” – nothing compares to what has already occurred in Trump’s second term.

“It puts all of us at risk in new and troubling ways,” she says.

Public-interest health reporting should provide people with the information they need to best manage their own health and that of their loved ones. It should also highlight harmful wrongdoings – by people, companies or governments – so that those in positions of influence can make changes for the better.

We can’t do that if we don’t know how long cancer screening is taking to roll out, or whether the rates of youth vaping are increasing, or if there is a spike in side effects linked to a certain drug.

Our own Global Health reporting team relies on empirical data (and sometimes even generates its own, like here and here) to expose inequalities around the world and spark positive change.

Many of the team’s biggest stories have come from CDC figures and other data – like this one revealing the US companies selling diseased meat; this investigation into Big Tobacco lobbying tactics; and this exposé of a North Carolina tobacco farmer turned politician accused of abusing his workers.

“Our jobs just got a lot harder,” says Blum, “And they also became a lot more necessary, because our government is in information-failure mode at the moment and there are going to be issues – from viral outbreaks to climate threats to environmental exposures – that people need to know.”

While she says that researchers and journalists are protecting existing information as best as possible, we know that “information on safe contraception is gone, some vaccine information is gone, some racial equity data is gone”.

Erasing information about marginalised groups is particularly dangerous. We know that health inequities cost lives and years lived well. But it’s the data that bears this out and helps us address the issues. Research shows that Black women around the world have worse pregnancy outcomes than other women, LGBTQ young people suffer elevated rates of mental ill-health, and Indigenous people die on average four years earlier than the general US population.

There is already a gulf of reliable data for many diseases and patient groups. This will only widen the gap.

“People need to have the tools to make decisions that protect themselves and their families,” says Blum. “From vaccination to avoiding drugs that have been recalled to being aware of chemical spills or water contamination to food that has been found to contain dangerous pathogens.”

Blum thinks that a complete reversal is “basically dreaming”. But she says: “I hope that my profession will step up, invest even further in good science reporting and getting information out there”.

“We aren’t the entire solution to this problem. But we are definitely one of the answers so it's on us to get it right.”

It’s data that helps us separate fact from fiction. When the evidence is concealed, it allows the powerful to evade scrutiny – and leaves the rest of us to suffer.