Nearly half of CDC-run public databases on federal health surveillance stopped or delayed updates in 2025, including many webpages on vaccinations, according to a study published Jan. 27 in Annals of Internal Medicine.
In January 2025, White House officials told federal health agencies, including the CDC, to pause external communications, including health advisories and scientific reports. Agencies were also instructed to “[t]ake down webpages promoting gender ideology within 48 hours” of Jan. 29, 2025.
By early February 2025, the CDC and other agencies removed webpages related to gender-based violence, HIV, teenage depression, reproductive care, abortion access, LGBTQ+ issues, health equity, tuberculosis and other health conditions and diseases. Some pages were republished with certain words removed.
Although a federal judge ordered the agencies in February to restore earlier versions of the scrubbed webpages and later ruled the White House order as “void,” 38 of the CDC’s 82 public data records had “unexplained pauses,” as of Oct. 28, the study found.
Researchers from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Boston University School of Law investigated the scope of the federal health information scrub.
The study found:
- From 1,359 CDC catalog records, the researchers identified 82 that were previously updated at least monthly.
- Forty-six percent were paused. A large majority, 87%, of the paused public databases were vaccination-related topics.
- Among the five other paused databases not related to vaccination, four addressed respiratory disease tracking and one covered drug overdose deaths.
- Thirty-four of the 38 databases had received no updates within six months.
- As of Dec. 1, the number of paused records declined from 38 to 37.
“Changes to individual dashboards or update schedules reflect routine data quality and system management decisions, not political direction,” an HHS spokesperson told ABC News. “Under this administration, public health data reporting is driven by scientific integrity, transparency, and accuracy.”
