In the initial days of the Trump administration, officials scoured federal websites for any mention of what they deemed “DEI” keywords — terms as generic as “diverse” and “historically” and even “women.” They soon identified reams of some of the country’s most valuable public health data containing some of the targeted words, including language about LGBTQ people, and quickly took down much of it — from surveys on obesity and suicide rates to real-time reports on immediate infectious disease threats like bird flu.

The removal elicited a swift response from public health experts who warned that without this data, the country risked being in the dark about important health trends that shape life-and-death public health decisions made in communities across the country.

Some of this data was restored in a matter of days, but much of it was incomplete. In some cases, the raw data sheets were posted again, but the reference documents that would allow most people to decipher them were not. Meanwhile, health data continues to be taken down: The New York Times reported last week that data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on bird flu transmission between humans and cats had been posted and then promptly removed.

This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.

Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.

Luckily, non-government groups had rapidly started downloading the existing data when rumors of a broad data purge started to circulate in Washington. Cynthia Cox, vice president of the health policy nonprofit KFF, told me the organization had saved the entire archive of the Department of Health and Human Services pages, as did other groups. Health analyst Charles Gaba has also said he grabbed all of the CDC’s data before it was swiped.

Thanks to the efforts of these groups, the effects of the purge will be blunted — but it’s an ominous harbinger........

© Vox