Several government websites that made reference to sexual orientation and gender mysteriously vanished from the internet a few weeks after President Trump took office.
After a court injunction in February, many came back. However, they included an odd tack: a statement from the Department of Health and Human Services refuting information from its own departments.
According to a statement that is currently appended to several government webpages, including some that discuss HIV, civil rights protections, and healthcare for transgender people, any information on this page that promotes gender ideology is incredibly inaccurate and disconnected from the unchangeable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Administration and this Department reject this page because it does not represent biological fact.
The U.S. government, which was previously a global leader in public health guidelines, is now launching the unique endeavor of suppressing or removing material that its own researchers formerly made public.
An extensive report on the health effects of climate change, written by staff members of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other government agencies, was lost when the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s website went down on Monday.
Numerous National Institutes of Health research databases on subjects including cancer and Alzheimer’s disease now indicate that they are being reviewed for possible changes in accordance with Administration directions.
New pages that occasionally conflict with evidence-based recommendations made on the same website have been introduced to several federal websites.Both a recent presentation by vaccination skeptic Lyn Redwood regarding the risks of the preservative thimerosal and a fact sheet released in December refuting many of the false claims made by anti-vaccine activists regarding thimerosal are presently available on CDC.gov. (The website also mentions that in 2001, thimerosal was eliminated from pediatric immunizations in the United States.)
Having fewer resources to assist the public and healthcare practitioners in making educated decisions is the result, according to doctors and child health activists this week, further undermining public confidence in science.
Whatever analogy you choose, this is a five-alarm fire, according to pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Sean O. Leary, who also serves as the chair of the infectious disease committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The information appears one day and disappears the next. And politics, not science, is the only force behind it. To be honest, it’s dystopian, O Leary stated. The work that the CDC does for the American people is a model for the rest of the world, and it is being negatively impacted.
The Times spoke with a number of doctors, including O Leary, who emphasized that the conflicting messages coming from U.S. government agencies did not indicate a breakdown in public health professionals’ consensus, but rather the administration’s disregard for their knowledge.
O Leary stated that all of the country’s professional associations, medical associations, and scientific societies are in agreement. We all agree that the situation is chaotic and extremely frightening for the American people.
The CDC’s pediatric immunization schedule has lost the support of the American Academy of Pediatrics for the first time since the 1990s. Visitors to the academy website are redirected to a version of the CDC’s most recent guidelines, which were issued in November and still urge that children 6 months and older receive the COVID-19 vaccine, rather than the most recent guidelines, which no longer explicitly recommend that children receive the vaccine.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine both released statements condemning the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ decision last month to recommend only thimerosal-free flu shots and to remove the COVID vaccine recommendations for healthy pregnant individuals without the scientific input the committee normally receives prior to such decisions. (The CDC reports that approximately 96% of the flu vaccines given last year lacked thimerosal.)
The COVID vaccine is currently considered a shared clinical decision-making vaccination for children by the CDC. According to CDC.gov, this designation is based on an individual basis and is determined by a decision-making process between the patient or parent/guardian and the healthcare provider, in contrast to routine or risk-based vaccine recommendations.
However, Bruce Lesley, president of the child health advocacy group First Focus on Children, said the administration is denying parents the evidence-based information they need to make informed decisions by reducing and obscuring the material it makes publicly available.
According to Lesley, we should all rely on some kind of protections and knowledge. It is impossible to place such load on parents and then assume that everything will work out.
Physicians and other healthcare professionals have long relied on the CDC website in particular to stay up to date on evidence-based treatment recommendations and new health trends across the nation, according to experts.
According to Dr. Eric Ball, a pediatrician in Orange County and the leader of the American Academy of Pediatrics California, “all of this is creating a lot of confusion, not just for our families and our patients, but also for our providers and our doctors.” To provide the greatest treatment for our patients, we depend on reliable information from public health sources. When we can’t trust such sources, it becomes harder for us to do our jobs and puts our communities’ health at risk.
The Data Rescue Project and RestoredCDC.org are two independent initiatives that have emerged since Trump took office to archive what data may be salvaged from federal websites before it is withdrawn or deleted.
However, Dr. Tina Tan, a pediatrics professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, stated that the patchwork of alternatives cannot take the place of what CDC.gov has long been for the American public: a one-stop clearinghouse for evidence-based information presented in plain language.
Now, the question is, where can you find reliable information and who can you trust? And that’s a big problem,” Tan stated. The American people must realize that they will be impacted in some way by all of these developments.
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