NEW YORK — Federal health agencies have restored several webpages and datasets, following a judge’s order to bring back public access to information that had been removed to comply with a presidential executive order.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday night restored nine webpages and datasets, including pages on adolescent health, information on HIV monitoring and testing, contraception guidance, and data on how pollution, poverty and other factors impact certain communities.
The Food and Drug Administration restored recommendations for increasing enrollment of females in clinical trials, analyzing and interpreting sex-specific data and including sex-specific information in regulatory submissions of medical products.
On Jan. 20, his first day back in the White House, President Donald Trump signed an order for agencies to use the term “sex” and not “gender” in federal policies and documents. In response, the Office of Personnel Management’s acting director required agency heads to eliminate any programs and take down any websites that promote “gender ideology.” That led to widespread takedowns across government websites.
Some information gradually was put back up, at least in part. But public health experts raised alarms about things that remained missing. Doctors for America, represented by the Public Citizen Litigation Group, sued OPM, the CDC, the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington instructed the government to restore access to several webpages and datasets that the group identified as missing from websites and to identify others that also were taken down “without adequate notice or reasoned explanation.”
The nine CDC pages cited in the lawsuit were restored to how they were on Jan. 30, according to a federal health official who was not authorized to discuss it and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. However, on Wednesday morning the work did not appear complete: Some links on pages that had been pulled down weren’t working.
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Pananjady reported from Philadelphia.
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