WA public health leaders frustrated over CDC data purges

Feb. 6—Members of Washington’s medical and scientific community have spent the past two weeks scrambling to understand and respond to recent federal changes that appear to limit and threaten parts of their work.

Much is still unknown about how much of the barrage of White House orders will stick, but local public health teams, clinical providers and researchers say they’re worried about short- and long-term impacts to health efforts for Washingtonians.

On Jan. 21, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services halted all public communications. The following day, a number of National Institutes of Health meetings, scheduled to review grant and fellowship applications, were abruptly canceled. Then the White House’s budget office ordered a freeze on federal grants and loans, including those related to diversity, transgender inclusion and climate change — before rescinding the order two days later.

Executive orders to shrink spending on climate change efforts, and those around diversity, equity and inclusion, however, remain in place.

And in the past week, more than 8,000 webpages across over a dozen U.S. government websites have been scrubbed, according to a New York Times analysis. The purge includes thousands of webpages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with content ranging from research articles studying chronic conditions to clinical guidelines around Mpox vaccines, that state and local health departments often rely on.

“The CDC was something all clinicians say was the gold standard,” said Justin Gill, an urgent care nurse practitioner in the Everett area. “With concerning efficiency, it’s almost been turned into a laughingstock as far as ability of getting information.”

Many health care workers are “extremely frustrated,” said Gill, who is president of the Washington State Nurses Association.

The extent to which local public health work will be impacted by these federal decisions is still somewhat unclear, according to several county health departments.

Dr. James Miller, health officer of the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, said he doesn’t imagine immediate, significant changes to day-to-day operations. Pierce County’s public health department plans to continue providing essential services and resources to residents as usual, he said.

But losing long-term access to the CDC’s national disease monitoring and guidance on outbreaks would be difficult, Miller said.

“This is particularly important for us when we’re looking at new or emerging issues,” he said. “Highly pathogenic avian influenza, for example, is an area where we really rely on the CDC to collect and analyze new data and to share information about what’s happening in other states or countries. That’s harder for us to replace.”

At Public Health — Seattle & King County, staffers don’t yet have a good sense of how, or if, work at the state’s largest county health department will be interrupted, department spokesperson Sharon Bogan said in a statement.

“We are continuing to assess what data sources may be impacted by short-term unavailability, as well as longer-term impacts if data or health guidance is limited or taken down,” Bogan wrote this week. “We should have a better sense of the impacts over the next several weeks.”

The state Department of Health said it’s also still trying to figure out the full effect of the changes.

DOH frequently looks to the CDC for disease-tracking efforts, like infectious disease surveillance and collecting vaccination rates. The agency also leans on a range of other CDC data sets to develop statewide public health responses, DOH said in a statement.

National data on health disparities, including racial, ethnic and socioeconomic gaps; youth behavioral health, including around chronic disease, mental health and substance use; and LGBTQ+ health are all also vital to the agency’s work in tracking progress over time, advocating for policy changes, monitoring outbreaks and informing guidance, the statement said.

“We’re currently working to download and archive critical data that may be at risk, but the loss of public access would make ongoing public health monitoring more challenging,” the agency wrote. “We hope the interruptions are temporary and that full access is restored soon.”

In addition, DOH added, many nonprofits use these data sets to advocate for funding and develop public health programs, efforts the department also worried could be impeded in the long term.

“While DOH has internal systems to monitor public health data, we rely on national data sets for broader trend analysis and comparison, which supports informed decision-making,” the agency wrote. “The loss of these resources could delay or complicate this process.”

While day-to-day public health work might not yet be disrupted, Gill said he has already felt consequences of the CDC webpage removals.

“I had a patient recently who was worried about norovirus,” he said. “When I checked the CDC norovirus page, it was last updated in mid-January. Politics has gotten into what we rely on in health care.”

The Trump administration has already reversed or paused some changes, though there does not appear to be a clear end in sight for others. On Tuesday, at least some NIH study sessions — to review grant applications — resumed after about two weeks, though it hasn’t been confirmed if they’re all back on schedule, according to STAT News. Some health agencies were still hit with meeting cancellations this week, including one for an advisory council to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, STAT reported.

The HHS communications pause also still appears to largely be in effect, though an initial agency memo said it was supposed to lift Feb. 1.

But even if health- and science-related webpages are restored soon, Gill said he worries people will no longer consider the information reliable. He pointed to a yellow banner at the top of the CDC website that says it’s “being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” He wondered what people might think once the webpages have been “modified.”

“‘Is this being politicized? Is this something we can rely on?’ We’re already seeing a decrease in trust in a lot of these institutions,” he said. “This further erodes the trust.”

In Pierce County, Miller said his department’s epidemiologists and analysts would find “other ways to adjust” if they lose access to some federal health data long term. In developing or updating public health guidance, they would more heavily depend on state DOH direction or professional groups, like the Infectious Diseases Society of America, he said.

“They would figure out other ways to measure what we need to measure … but it would impact us. It would take additional time to develop alternate approaches,” Miller said.