As the Trump admin deletes online data, scientists and digital librarians rush to save it

The race is on to save public information about health and science before Trump makes it disappear

"Deleting gobs of public data/resources as well is the digital equivalent of book burning."

By Carlyn Zwarenstein
Published February 4, 2025 11:46AM (EST)
Updated February 5, 2025 8:34PM (EST)

"Orders from the Trump administration affecting science and health in the United States — and from there, the world — are coming thick and fast, affecting a myriad of institutional and personal decisions that depend on accurate information provided by the U.S. government. This ranges from websites disappearing to the prohibition of dictionary words from federal scientist research papers. Now researchers and data nerds are rushing to preserve this vital information before it’s lost.

"Meanwhile, many public communications have been paused as well. For the first time in sixty years, the federal health agency, the Centers for Disease Control (#CDC), has stopped its own publications, including the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (#MMWR). This comes on top of a communications gag order preventing its scientists from sharing any new findings — from new insights in cancer treatment to potential new pandemics like #Ebola — with the public.

"Additionally, it orders that a list of specific terms be removed from any CDC research manuscript being submitted to, already being considered, or already in press by any scientific or medical journal, with publication paused or retracted until the terms are scrubbed from the work. The terms in question are: Gender, #transgender, #PregnantPerson, pregnant people, #LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, #nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.

"A quick search by Salon of PubMed, the National Institutes of Health-run database of academic biomedical and health publications as well as related disciplines like life sciences and chemical sciences, shows that it currently contains 145,340 pages’ worth of results (1,453,391individual publications) featuring the term '#gender,' and 5,613 publications with the term '#transexual,' with papers dating back to 1903.

"Since most medical science papers report demographic details, excluding papers that report this information or use this language would mean un-publishing exciting new findings on cancer treatment, or, say, vital information about #H5N1 transmission among American #farmworkers or the ongoing #tuberculosis outbreak in the #KansasCity area. The exact implications of President Trump’s orders are not entirely clear, so it’s hard to say exactly what may not be published as a result, but pre-emptive self-censorship is also likely. On Monday, some of the pages had already been restored, according to the New York Times, underscoring the unpredictable status of some federal information.

"In the meantime, a general communications gag order bans any CDC scientist from submitting any new scientific findings to the public. As federally-funded health websites and webpages disappear in real time from the Internet, the race is on to preserve vital datasets and formerly public information.

"Charles Gaba, a health care policy data analyst and web developer, created links on his website to every mirrored copy of the CDC’s public facing web pages as they appear on the #InternetArchive, a nearly 30-year-old non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the internet from #censorship and #DataDecay.

"'These pages and related files are both funded by taxpayers and specifically intended to be for the general public, after all,' Gaba told Salon. In quickly indexing every public-facing page on the CDC site in the nick of time, he anticipated what has happened over the past few days, although perhaps not the specifics of Trump’s Jan. 29 memo to all federal departments and agencies, outlining an executive order called '#DefendingWomen', that seems to have triggered the hasty scrubbing of federally-funded sites.

"Still, Gaba notes that both the former president’s campaign statements, and language in the policy playbook #Project2025, had promised to purge the federal government of 'anyone or anything' that they see as related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and of purging federal agencies of references and resources to the same."

https://www.salon.com/2025/02/04/as-the-admin-deletes-online-data-scientists-and-digital-librarians-rush-to-save-it/
#USPol #Fascism #Erasure #TransRightsAreHumanRights #TransHistoryIsHumanHistory #BookBurning #TrumpIsTryingToKillUsAllOff #CharacteristicsOfFascism