The directives of the Trump administration to purge the websites of the information government linked to certain subjects – such as “gender ideology”, reproductive rights, diversity, equity and inclusion – led to the Disappearance of thousands of web pages and datasets.
About 8,000 pages were removed from government websites, according to an article in the New York Times on February 2, although some pages have since been restored. Information on vaccines, veterans care, hatred crimes and scientific research has been deleted, as well as information on many other subjects, according to Times.
Members of the community of the Harvard Th Cha Cha Chan public health community are one of those who maintain that this purge affects public health in several ways, for example by eliminating access to the crucial health information used by clinicians and Patients, and hiding the data used by healthy researchers.
“This has international ramifications – it deforms the scientific base,” said Nancy KriegerProfessor of social epidemiology, in an article of February 4 in The Guardian. “Science disappears from American websites, the work of science sponsored by the government disappears, the sets of data disappear.” She added: “If you are going to do a reproducible reproducible science, you need to access the data. You must have data from the past. »»
Cited in an article in the New York Times on January 31, Krieger said: “There was a story in this country recently to try to make data disappear, as if it made problems disappear. But the problems do not disappear and the suffering gets worse. »»
Krieger helped direct a “dataathon” on January 31 – a rush to the download and backup of data from federal websites, including information on LGBTQ +problems, racism, climate change and equity of the health. Another researcher from Harvard Chan –Ariel BecciaAn instructor in the Department of Epidemiology Who conducts research related to young people, race / ethnic, gender / gender and sexual orientation – was also involved. It has been focused in particular on the safeguarding of information in the risk behavior monitoring system for young people, a large standard of information on young people.
“It’s really a crisis,” said Beccia in an article on January 31 Boston Globe. “This is a systematic dismantling of a large part of our public health system.”
Jonathan Gilmour, a scientist of the Harvard Chan school data who is researching the impacts on the health of climate change, helped preserve a website that helps identify communities at particular risk of climate change called the Climate and economic screening tool. In an article of January 31 in the journalist’s resource, he said: “In my lifetime, in the United States, I do not know another situation where researchers were anxious to lose access to the data they had Access to their any career. It is disastrous.
Read the Guardian article: CDC’s web pages become dark while Trump targets public health information
Read the New York Times articles:
Health resources disappear afterwards and gender orders
Thousands of web pages of the US government have been deleted since Friday
Read the Boston Globe article: Critical data on the transmission of diseases, LGBTQ + health disappears from government websites
Read the journalist’s resources article: Researchers rush to preserve federal health databases before disappearing from government websites