US federal websites scrub vaccine data and LGBT references

The Trump administration has scrubbed references to LGBT health, and information on certain vaccines from federal websites, including top public health agencies.

The move follows a Wednesday memo instructing agencies to end all "programs that use taxpayer money to promote gender ideology" and disable related information from websites by Friday afternoon.

Trump has already issued executive orders that banned diversity, equity and inclusion in the government, as well as one that recognised two sexes, male and female.

Asked by reporters on Friday if websites would be shut down to remove diversity-related content, he said: "If they want to scrub the websites, that's OK with me."

DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programmes aim to promote participation in workplaces by people from a range of backgrounds.

Their backers say they address historical or ongoing discrimination and underrepresentation of certain groups, including racial minorities, but critics argue such programmes can themselves be discriminatory.

On Saturday, leading public health agencies appeared to have culled webpages that discussed gender, sexually transmitted diseases, and LGBT health.

Several web pages for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now display error messages.

The agency's website contains a yellow banner message that reads, "CDC's website is being modified to comply with President Trump's Executive Orders".

CDC webpages that previously contained such data on youth, transgender and LGBT health contained "page not found" messages on Saturday morning.

The CDC serves as a critical repository for official government health data and research.

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The National Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) seems to have disappeared from its landing pages. The ongoing study focused on topics such as nutrition, mental health, physical activity, and sexual activity for high school students.

The tool used to explore the data is now offline.

A version of the page, captured by the internet archive the WayBack Machine, shows the page was live as recently as mid-January.

The archived pages show that one aspect of study included children who "felt that they were ever treated badly or unfairly because they are or people think they are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning".

Another page dedicated to "Supporting LGBTQ+ Youth" was also not available on Saturday morning, though the page is archived by the WayBack Machine.

A page that collated data related to "Health Disparities Among LGBTQ Youth" also appears to be gone.

"Stigma, discrimination, and other factors put them at increased risk for negative health and life outcomes," an archived version of the page states.

A page for recommended vaccines was temporarily unavailable, but returned on Saturday without mention of the monkeypox (mpox) vaccine, the Washington Post reported.

The mpox vaccine is recommended for, among other individuals, gay and bisexual men, as well as people who identified as transgender or nonbinary, according to the New York State Department of Health.

A CDC page with recommendations for the mpox vaccine displayed an error message on Saturday.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the umbrella agency that oversees the Centers for Disease Control and other US public health agencies, also took down pages relating to diversity and inclusion.

A key page from the agency's Office of Civil Rights no longer appears to contain any information. The website for the office remains, but a reader who wishes to click on the "civil rights" page of the site will see nothing but an error message.

"All changes to the HHS website and HHS division websites are in accordance with President Trump's January 20 Executive Orders," HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement.

The executive orders are also causing upheaval at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

A database holding decades of aid records was temporarily down with a message prompting visitors to "check back soon..."

USAID staff received an email stating the agency was "conducting a thorough review of all USAID-funded initiatives, offices, and positions to eliminate any that promote or reflect gender ideology," CBS News, the BBC's US partner, reported.

On Wednesday, the Office of Personnel Management sent a memo to agencies directing them to comply with an executive order dedicated to "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (Defending Women)".

It instructed they should take down "all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology".

The memo also instructed staff to "review agency email systems such as Outlook and turn off features that prompt users for their pronouns".

Earlier this week, a supplementary grant from the National Institutes of Health that helped research institutions to hire staff from diverse backgrounds abruptly expired on 24 January, 2025, long before it was set to close.

The CDC did not respond to BBC's request for comment about the grant's early expiration. A few days later, the link to the grant's information page led to an error message with a frowning emoji.

An employee at HHS told the BBC he feared programmes such as this grant would get the axe due to Trump's executive orders.

"Getting rid of that may hold a lot of weight in impacting the future of the scientific workforce," the employee said of the grant's elimination. "But it might be years or decades before we know how that will negatively impact science."

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has fired a group of prosecutors assigned to investigate the US Capitol riot, and also demanded the names of FBI agents involved in those same inquiries, according to CBS News, the BBC's US partner.