🗂️Keep in Mind Where to Find Accurate Medical Info Recently Removed From the CDC's Site

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In my work reporting on health, I often refer to the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and more. Healthcare workers, scientists, and others rely on these, too. But information has been disappearing from those websites.

There’s no simple hack to work around this. Some vital information is missing. Some has been restored, with subtle and not-so-subtle changes—like suggesting you search for adoption when you actually searched for abortion, or replacing the phrase “pregnant people” with “pregnant women,” as if the word “people” did not already include women.

And we don’t know how future additions to the website may be hobbled. The CDC’s weekly research publication, which had operated more-or-less independently when it came to publishing research, has been under “unprecedented control” by the Trump administration, CBS News reports. That publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, didn’t put out its Jan. 23 or Jan. 30 issues.

In the midst of a bird flu epidemic that is driving up egg prices and threatening to spread well beyond farms, the administration reportedly stopped the publication of three studies on bird flu, including one on wastewater, one on exposure in cattle veterinarians, and one—whose data was accidentally published and then yanked—on the ability of bird flu to be transmitted between people and farm cats.

There’s no replacing the MMWR’s independence, and some of the information pulled from the CDC’s website has not yet been returned, including guidelines for Mpox vaccination, and other pages on sexually transmitted infections including HIV and on LGBTQ+ health concerns and disparities, as reported by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

A federal judge has ordered the CDC to restore data on its website, but the Trump administration has ignored plenty of court orders relating to its illegal activity in recent weeks—so forgive my skepticism. Until then, here are a few places to find missing health and medical information that the CDC would normally have been able to provide.

Physician associations like ACOG and AMA​

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has made sure to publish its “endorsed guidance” documents that were authored with the CDC. “Endorsed” means that these are guidelines that ACOG fully supports. As the name of the organization suggests, these documents are ones that relate to obstetrics and gynecology.

The American Medical Association has a Youtube series dedicated to weekly reports of health and medical news—hardly a replacement for the MMWR, but worth keeping an eye on if you want to stay up-to-date on current health issues in the U.S.

The good old Wayback Machine​

If you’ve found a dead link for something that used to be on the CDC website, check the Wayback Machine at archive.org. It may not have everything, but I was able to find some missing content there. For example, a PDF entitled “A Guide to Talking About HIV” that used to live here is available in a Wayback Machine snapshot from December 2024.

Data mirror projects​

A project called the End-of-term Web Archive has downloaded government websites at the end of each presidential term since 2008. Other organizations have been attempting to save information from the CDC and other government websites, as Nature reports. The University of Minnesota has a collection of end-of-term data repositories here.

The Internet Archive has some CDC datasets here, including data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which is no longer on the CDC website. (Its data explorer was here, but clicking that link currently just loads a message saying “The Application is currently offline.”)

Other countries’ health agencies​

The U.S. CDC may be the most prominent (or it was, anyway, I guess) but other countries have their equivalents. The Public Health Agency of Canada, for example, has information on topics like sexual health that may be unavailable on the CDC website.
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