More than 8,000 web pages across a dozen US government websites have been taken down since last Friday, as federal agencies scramble to comply with Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity initiatives.
More than 3,000 of them were temporarily removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These include large amounts of public datasets about HIV, vaccines, teens’ health, transgender and LGBTQ+ people. Researchers, medical professionals and reporters heavily rely on them for public health research and monitoring.
“It’s like a data apocalypse,” virologist Angela Rasmussen told Science.
Some researchers rushed to preserve databases by downloading them or saving them on internet archives like the Wayback Machine, but it is not yet clear how much information will be permanently removed and what changes may be made to future data collection efforts.
