NEW YORK — Federal officials have agreed to restore health- and science-related webpages and data under to a lawsuit settlement with doctors groups and other organizations who sued.
The settlement was announced this week by the lead plaintiffs in the case, the Washington State Medical Association.
Soon after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, federal health officials deleted or removed information on a range of topics including pregnancy risks, opioid-use disorder and the AIDS epidemic. The move was made in reaction to a Trump executive order that told agencies to stop using the term “gender” in federal policies and documents.
The administration saw it as a move to end the promotion of “gender ideology.” Doctors, scientists and public health advocates saw it as an “egregious example of government overreach,” says Dr. John Bramhall, the organization’s president, said in a statement.
“This was trusted health information that vanished in a blink of an eye — resources that, among other things, physicians rely on to manage patients’ health conditions and overall care,” Bramhall said.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has agreed to restore more than 100 websites and resources to the state they were in, said Graham Short, a spokesperson for the Washington State doctors’ group.
“We expect the sites will be restored in the coming weeks,” Short said in an email.
The case was filed in federal court in Seattle. The plaintiffs include, among others, the Vermont Medical Society, the Washington State Nurses Association and the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care.
The defendants included U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and federal health agencies and officials who work under him.
Federal officials responded to questions about the settlement with this statement: “HHS remains committed to its mission of removing radical gender and DEI ideology from federal programs, subject to applicable law, to ensure taxpayer dollars deliver meaningful results for the American people.”
The case is similar to one filed in Washington, D.C., by Doctors for America and others against the government. That lawsuit also sought to force the government to restore health information to the public, and the two cases overlapped somewhat in the websites they targeted, Short said.
In July, a judge in the Doctors for America case ordered restoration of websites. As of last week, 167 of the websites at issue had been restored and 33 were still under review, according to a court filing.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
