CDC Data Are Disappearing

Removing these records from the public internet could likely be considered illegal under the OPEN Government Data Act, 44 U.S.C. § 3506:

> (d) With respect to information dissemination, each agency shall— (3) provide adequate notice when initiating, substantially modifying, or terminating significant information dissemination products; (4) not, except where specifically authorized by statute— (A) establish an exclusive, restricted, or other distribution arrangement that interferes with timely and equitable availability of public information to the public; (B) restrict or regulate the use, resale, or redissemination of public information by the public

If these datasets were actually permanently deleted then the incident should be investigated by NARA [1]. The people responsible could be charged with a crime under 18 U.S.C. § 2071: > (b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.

1. https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/resources/unauthorized...

Data is the ultimate Fact Check. This is a President that's adamantly opposed to fact checking [1] and has even coerced Facebook to drop fact checking. Of course they don't want data on government sites that disprove their "alternate facts".

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4920827-60-minutes-tru...

I’m an epidemiology professor and I write a weekly “weather report” outbreaks [1]. These communication and data blackouts are coming at a bad time. We’re having an unusual flu season—activity has rebounded unexpectedly. I’ve been having to scramble for data, last week by visiting each state health department website. It’s really troubling and consequential.

[1] https://caitlinrivers.substack.com

The scope of the scrubbing is broader that datasets. On /r/medicine they're reporting that some treatments guidelines for physicians (100 page+ PDF's) are disappearing, if they're adjacent to the topic of sex:

https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1iepzln/cdc_has_r... ("CDC has removed the pages with STI treatment and contraceptive guidelines (self.medicine)")

This is a blitzkrieg campaign designed to try and get Musk and his people as much control of the digital government as possible before the roadblocks (legal, systematic, etc.) make things too difficult for him. As it stands, his goal is likely a purge of the federal government akin to what he did with Twitter. And the resulting 80% drop in revenue by Twitter is a similar kind of outcome we can expect from his careless meddling.

Maybe useful to someone:

https://archive.org/details/20250128-cdc-datasets

"""

An archive of all CDC datasets uploaded to https://data.cdc.gov/browse before January 28th, 2025. Excludes corrupt datasets and data not publicly accessible.

Most datasets are accompanied by an additional file ending in -meta that includes the metadata associated with the data. Attachments referenced in these files can be found in the attachments/ folder.

If you would like to seed this data to improve its redundancy please do not use the auto generated torrent, as it is incomplete. Instead use the torrent file labeled "full-20250128-cdc-datasets-USETHIS.torrent"

"""

It’s terrifying that data US taxpayers paid for, collected and analyzed in the name of public health, can be removed on a whim. While there are a lot of efforts to archive said data, it would still make it unavailable to Americans who are not tech savvy. Unfortunately, that seems to be the idea, I think.

An "interesting" consequence of these type of measures of stopping collecting or publishing data will be that soon it will be impossible to tell how much infant mortality, or number of cases of tuberculosis or similar changed with respect to last year. Maybe that is partially the goal.

This is very similar to when the CDC stopped recording defensive gun use statistics! The pendulum is certainly swinging, on the other hand, I think we should retain data even if it doesn’t align with the current administration. I think it’s important that people should record data that they value, independent of governments, so they can maintain a source of truth throughout time. Articles from Axios, NYT and posts on X can change or be deleted, it’s important to take snapshots to go back and check for deltas.

This is part of a broader rolling catastrophe. Musk is evidently seizing control of the Office of Personnel Management

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-01-31/exclus...

Nasa took down their applied sciences page and is evidently scrubbing the data

https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/1icqchv/why_is_the_nas...

(https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/)

Lots of other data sets are disappearing too:

https://mashable.com/article/government-datasets-disappear-s...

There is active discussion of this at https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/

as well as at https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/

There's some people organizing to preserve stuff under the "safeguarding research" moniker

https://fedihum.org/@SafeguardingResearch

https://safeguarding-research.discourse.group/

Related ongoing thread:

Archivists work to save disappearing data.gov datasets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42881367 - Jan 2025 (56 comments)

America voted for cons, crooks and thugs. And is getting conned, crooked and thugged.

Entirely predictable. And well deserved. I say this as someone living and suffering in America.

There is no one else to blame but ourselves. The future is bleak.

Don't worry, absolutely no issues have occurred in medicine as a result of a lack of data on how a drug impacts pregnant people.

Let's assume that in 4 years, existing limitations are still in place and a new POTUS is in place. It would be interesting if these edits are soft deletes where they are easily reversed with the next administration, or will they need to go to the backups to restore data.

This ping ponging from one admin to the next on doesn't actually change the science. "The great thing about science is that it doesn't need you to believe it for it to be true." To me, the thinking that the hiding of data is going to make it go away is just one of those things that shows how unintelligent the person with that notion truly is.

My prediction is that any future data that is published will likely show up in the x.com app. I believe they are trying to privatize all government functions and Musk wants X to be the official government super-app similar to China's system.

Is there an organization forming that opposes these fasicts? The Democrats are useless.

Can any one point me to a group of organized and motivated individuals?

What terrifies me this time around compared to the previous one is that people in support of this kind of initiative are either much more vocal, more boosted, or simply more dominant. In his first term, there was still a form of reserve. It even permeates in this comment thread. It now feels like crazy conspiracy theories and idiocy have become an accepted, and either major stance. I just went on Twitter for a minute, and the only response to anything sensible is insults and derogatory calling.

It just started and I already feel tired

I've no doubt things like this will continue to happen. Trump, Musk and co will not stop on their own transforming the US into an authoritarian and likely fascist state. It's now up to the people of the US to stand up and save their democracy. Russia and China must be delighted to see the damage Trump's dealing.

This does not only affect the obvious ideological targets of purging any mention of DEI or gender. One section that is missing seems to be the official vaccine recommendations.

Go to the ACIP page (https://www.cdc.gov/acip/) and click on the "Vaccine-specific recommendations".

Other affected topics are HIV prevention, birth control/contraception, domestic violence and probably many more.

Where have I seen this before? Oh right, I remember now...

"The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. These included books written by Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist authors among others."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_book_burnings

Data is disappearing.

Data is a perfectly valid uncountable noun these days. In fact, it's the de facto standard for amorphous collections of digital data, used by most writers, data analysts and laypeople alike. The uncountable form is awkward and out of place in all but the most specific contexts.

Language is fluid. Used outdated forms is distracting.

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42894357

Don't know if whoever voted thought this through! We are undoing years of good governance, like Data.gov and this, now!

What a disgrace

The target isn't the people, the target is science. It is becoming clear that the intent is to govern through fear.

Is there any legal action happening to prevent removal of legally mandated data publication? Backing up data is useful but it seems if statute has requirements about data reporting, then you would expect some legal action?

Related ongoing discussion

The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42895331

Because journalists aren't able to do their jobs :

> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States.

They were disappearing 6 years ago too

What else do we need to backup now before it's gone?

This is the war on Science. Next comes the war on Education. The obliteration of democracy comes next. If you imagine Trump gives up this level of power without bloodshed in the streets you are deluding yourself.

When do we start marching in the streets?

Seems like there's more than a little malicious compliance happening to try and generate negative headlines.

Sounds like Gödel was right.

Clicked the link and quickly learned it was not about Change Data Capture...

Trump and a section of the conservative elite are like why let COVID or Bird Flu fuck up administration number two? Biden left them this nice present of obfuscating the data on increasing disability until after the election.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01074597

Are or is?

What's more depressing is this was completely predictable, totally avoidable, but half the country welcomed this wave of oppression with open arms.

Interesting to see how quickly the US is going downhill. I’m sure everyone thought “the Roman Empire is too big to fail” yet here we are with a similar mindset about USA.

It's too early to tell, but I would not be surprised if later at least a portion of this is found to be "malicious compliance".

For example, President Truman ordered the US military to be (re)integrated. Through malicious compliance, racist officers put their own spin on the orders.

"Well, he didn't say that black officers would get equal access to the officers club, so we won't let them in."

It too a former 5 star general (President Eisenhower) to stamp out the malicious compliance and make it stick.

There was already a case of malicious compliance with the DEI EO on the part of certain US air force personnel taking down material about the Tuskugee Airmen. The new sec def stomped that out within 4 hours.

@dang it's time to throw away the rules and use this site to stand up for what's right.

I would like to see ALL FDA documents on covid-19 vaccine emergency use authorization. Biden's FDA has been fighting court orders tooth and nail for 4 years. Where were all the Trump haters with their outrage... hypocrisy at its best.

Cover up by CDC of their past sins?

Nobody complained about downtimes (at least for Atlas Plus) when they started changing “sex” to “sex or gender” / “gender.” Let’s be honest.

I can’t find a single article about this because it was considered normal—they were simply upgrading their system. The level of dishonesty here is astounding.

Let’s wait three weeks. If Atlas Plus is still down, I’ll post an update here.

W.T.F.!?

Let us hope this is just a temporary thing.

Let us hope the disappearing data will resurface again at some point.

Let us hope this isn't driven by ideological motivations.

Sigh.

LLMs have already been trained on all of that data, so it's probably an empty gesture.

given the Atlantic's slightly left bias¹ and RFK Jr's stated intentions to shake things up with the FDA and CDC, it makes sense to me that the CDC would be preparing to cover their tracks preemptively.²

¹https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-atlantic/

²https://x.com/i/grok/share/GzB1sfssRnPBQlnQbecpFkWbV

Wait a second.

The EO in question doesn't require that all mentions of more than two genders be taken down (beyond a few specific policies).

The CDC immediately pulls down data that went beyond the requirements of the EO.

And now Democrats are saying "this is so scary, data is disappearing!!"

But it was Democrats that took the data down without being required to do so?

Brainfart ahead:

Is that maybe to prevent (for example china) from getting the data for AI models, but giving it to the "nice" Stargate?

If people really cared they would have stored copies of this data, not just relied on a single source.

It's sad to see that data is so politicised. You'd think that empirical data is irrefutable but Mr. Fauci's last-minute pardon ought to put all CDC data produced the last decade under scrutiny. While I agree with the removal of potentially erroneous information, I seriously hope the data is not just removed from the CDC website but remains available for the public (along with who's funds it was produced under) and becomes fact checked by non-pharma sponsored entities. Only this will restore trust and provide a more complete picture.

I recall several heads of the CDC auditioning, their answers to representatives would indicate it is/was (mis) information that undoubtedly the new administration would make sure to "purge".

It is becoming very difficult to distinguish justice from crooks in the U.S.

The CDC had lost all credibility anyway, dismantling it wouldn't be a bad idea, maybe not all of it, so that's what we are (not) seeing there.