CDC Ordered to Censor Data on its Websites and Scientific Journals

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has ordered its scientists to retract and pause the publication of all research being considered by any medical or scientific journal, not only its internal periodicals, Inside Medicine reported. The CDC aims to guarantee no “forbidden terms” appear in its work.

In the CDC’s orders, scientists were instructed to remove references and mentions of words, including gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, and biologically female.

The new orders go beyond commands President Donald Trump’s administration issued on Jan. 21 to pause external communications, including regular scientific reports, updates to websites, and health advisories, as CMM previously reported. The pause on communication includes the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), advisories sent out to clinicians on CDC’s health alert network about public health incidents, and data updates to the CDC website. The new order goes beyond the general communications gag order that already prevents any CDC scientist from submitting any new scientific findings to the public as it applies to previously submitted manuscripts under consideration and those accepted and not published yet. Scientists were also unclear if the orders applied to manuscripts that just included the forbidden terms in basic demographic data.

Additionally, several federal health websites and other resources were removed or altered as agencies comply with the executive order. Several CDC websites and databased related to HIV, LGBTQ people, youth behaviors, and more have been taken down or replaced, CNN reported. Many pages state: “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

For example, as of Jan. 31, several CDC pages related to HIV were removed, including the CDC’s HIV index page, testing page, datasets, national surveillance reports, and causes pages. Treatment guidelines for sexually transmitted infections were also taken down.