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Judge tells health agencies to restore website data

A federal judge directed health agencies to restore webpages and online datasets that were recently removed in response to an executive order from President Trump.

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U.S. District Judge John Bates issued a temporary restraining order on behalf of Doctors for America, a left-leaning physicians advocacy group, which recently sued a handful of federal agencies for scrubbing their websites of data they regularly use.

The physicians group argued the removal of the once publicly available data made it harder for them to treat patients and violated federal law.

After Trump signed executive orders aimed at “gender ideology” and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, federal health agencies began to scrub their websites to comply with the orders.

Several health agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention went almost completely dark as a result. Some of that data has been restored already, like CDC resources for tracking and preventing HIV.

But most of what has been removed is still missing, including recommendations for treating sexually transmitted infections and guidelines on prescribing contraception.

Judge Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, concluded that the removal of data likely violated a provision requiring federal agencies to provide “adequate notice or reasoned explanation.”

“This opinion has documented the harm DFA members have suffered and will continue to suffer absent intervention, but the harm extends beyond them,” Bates wrote in his ruling, referring to members of the advocacy group.

“DFA has also supplied declarations from doctors around the country who, although not DFA members themselves, are representative of the widespread disruption that defendants’ abrupt removal of these critical healthcare materials has caused,” he continued.

Health care workers routinely use such guidelines to determine how best to treat patients, making their removal harmful to doctors and the people they care for, according to Zachary Shelley, an attorney representing the physicians group.

“You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube that has already come out,” Shelley said. “You can stop it from flowing out going forward. Every day that this goes on, there’s harm to the doctors and their patients and public health.”

Read more about the lawsuit from The Hill’s Zach Schonfeld.

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