CDC Headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, photographed in 2014. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
As the Trump administration begins to purge a swath of official government web pages of information and data, a Michigan health care analyst and Democrat has created an easily accessible page with links to copies of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website made last week.
The data being deleted runs the gamut from LGBTQ+ health to the causes of HIV, all apparently in compliance with executive orders issued by President Donald Trump on his first day in office opposing gender diversity and ordering agencies to “remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.”
In response, Charles Gaba of Bloomfield Township, who founded ACASignups.net, a website that tracks Affordable Care Act data and health issues, on Sunday posted links to archived versions of 7,200 individual pages which were available at CDC.gov as of Jan. 27.
“It’s something which has been on my mind since Nov. 6 [the day after the presidential election], and if anything I wish I had taken action prior to Jan. 20 [Inauguration Day], since it’s possible that some critical data was already quietly purged in that first week before it became publicly known that they were doing so,” Gaba told the Michigan Advance.
Gaba said it’s important to note that all he is providing on his website are links to the most recently archived versions of the pages, which he said were actually mirrored by the Internet Archive, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
“There are plenty of simple tools available which let anyone download most of the public-facing HTML files (i.e. webpages) of most websites. And in this case, these are taxpayer-funded sites specifically intended for the public,” said Gaba. “The actual datasets themselves — some of which may involve terabytes of data — have been archived by others in ways which go far beyond my capabilities or resources.”
Gaba believes that in the short-term, the Trump administration probably only deleted a small portion of the public record so far, but points out that it’s only been less than two weeks since Trump took office.
“There’s also the possibility that they’ve modified some of the pages/data which hasn’t been outright deleted … or that they’ll do so in the future. All of this makes it critical to preserve as much of the actual record as possible,” he said.
Among the pages that are no longer accessible on the CDC website is CDC AtlasPlus, an interactive database that contained more than a decade of surveillance data for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and HIV surveillance reports that date back to the beginning of the epidemic in the 1980s.
Dr. Rob Davidson, an emergency physician in West Michigan and executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care, told the Advance that the loss of access to critical medical data places politics above people’s lives.
“The purge of health-related information on federal government websites is deeply concerning to physicians who want our patients to have access to trustworthy information based in medicine, not ideology,” said Davidson. “Particularly when so many Americans of all backgrounds still lack access to affordable health care — and more threats to access loom on the horizon — access to free, credible health resources on the internet is critical. We worry that stripping these resources from the web will mean even worse health outcomes for patients, and that removing data will impede much needed research on how to actually make Americans healthier.”
Gaba says the entire situation has a real “Big Brother” feel to it, which is why he posted a passage from George Orwell’s “1984” at the top of his featured blog entry that reads, in part:
“Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. … And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.”
Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.
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