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'Chaos and Fear' at CDC Amid Order to Retract Journal Articles to Purge 'Forbidden Terms'
"How can the government decide what words a journal can use to describe a scientific reality? That reality needs to be named," one journal editor said.
Feb 02, 2025
Employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been ordered to pull any articles under consideration for publication in medical or scientific journals so that they can be checked for certain "forbidden terms" including gender, transgender, and LGBT.
The order was sent in an email to CDC division heads on Friday by the agency's chief science officer, a federal official toldReuters on Sunday. Inside Medicine broke the news on Saturday and provided a screenshot of the full list of terms that needed to be scrubbed.
"It sounds incredible that this is compatible with the First Amendment. A constitutional right has been canceled," Dr. Alfredo Morabia, editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Public Health, told Reuters. "How can the government decide what words a journal can use to describe a scientific reality? That reality needs to be named."
"We can't just erase or ignore certain populations when it comes to preventing, treating, or researching infectious diseases such as HIV."
The order is an attempt to ensure that CDC is in compliance with U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order mandating that the U.S. government only recognize two sexes: male and female. The papers will be withdrawn so that a Trump appointee can review them.
The "forbidden terms" CDC employees are supposed to avoid are, in full: Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, and biologically female, according to Inside Medicine.
The order covers both papers under consideration and those accepted but not published. According to Reuters, if a CDC employee worked on a paper with nongovernmental scientists but did not initiate it, they have been asked to remove their names.
The new order is separate from a demand two days into the administration that government health agencies including CDC freeze all communications with the public. It follows reports on Friday that CDC webpages and datasets involving HIV, the LGBTQ community, youth health, and other topics were no longer accessible as the agency attempts to comply with the Trump executive order on transgender identity and another on banning government Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.
"It is Orwellian, it really is," Steven Woolf, director emeritus and senior adviser at Virginia Commonwealth University's Center on Society and Health,
In response to the purges, scientists, science journalists, and public health advocates have worked to preserve the datasets, with everything on the CDC website as of January 27, 2024 preserved at ACASignups.net and downloaded data sets also available on Jessica Valenti's Substack Abortion, Every Day.
"Censoring data on ideological grounds is wrong. It is unscientific, and it is designed to eliminate opposition and erase dissidents," virologist Angela Rasmussen, who was involved with the data preservation efforts, wrote on social media.
The journal article retraction order has created uncertainty and confusion at the agency, Inside Medicine reported:
How many manuscripts are affected is unclear, but it could be many. Most manuscripts include simple demographic information about the populations or patients studied, which typically includes gender (and which is frequently used interchangeably with sex). That means just about any major study would fall under the censorship regime of the new policy, including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else, let alone anything that the administration considers to be "woke ideology."
Meanwhile, chaos and fear are already guiding decisions. While the policy is only meant to apply to work that might be seen as conflicting with President Trump's executive orders, CDC experts don’t know how to interpret that. Do papers that describe disparities in health outcomes fall into "woke ideology" or not? Nobody knows, and everyone is scared that they'll be fired. This is leading to what Germans call "vorauseilender Gehorsam," or "preemptive obedience," as one non-CDC scientist commented.
There are also concerns that censoring such a broad list of terms would have unintended consequences for public health.
"We can't just erase or ignore certain populations when it comes to preventing, treating, or researching infectious diseases such as HIV. I certainly hope this is not the intent of these orders," Carl Schmid, the executive director of the HIV+ Hepatitis Policy Institute, told Reuters.
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Even as LA Burns, Most of Us Are Not 'There' Yet on Climate
Millions more people will die before anything close to enough "there-ness" occurs throughout the populace to prompt enough people to stand for change.
Jan 15, 2025
Can I admit something to you? Gotta say... I feel embarrassed about this. Perhaps even ashamed.
Okay, here goes: Yes, when I read, see, or hear accounts of what is happening in Los Angeles right now, I do experience empathy and sadness and compassion. And—oh yeah—also a healthy dose of heartbreak and rage about the torrents of disinformation that, these days, automatically mushroom around any event of any significance, especially if climate change is involved.
But—and here's the confession part—I am guessing that my primary reaction, the one about which I feel shame, is based upon this: I'm not there.
In other words, since it's not myself (or any of my loved ones) who is being directly and viscerally and financially impacted, my reactions of empathy occur (literally and figuratively) at a distance. Sure, I'll experience these feelings for a while, especially as I am taking in information or pictures about the situation, but then most of that will quickly evaporate as I go about my day. My at-a-distance reactions almost never move me to take direct and impactful and lasting action, because... I'm not there.
And so my primary reaction is a mixture of relief and (here comes the shame part) some level of indifference.
I'm not proud of this. But there it is.
Right now, there are obviously many thousands of people in Los Angeles who are "there." Right there. Exactly there. They are directly experiencing one of the scientifically understood symptoms of a fossil fuel-supercharged, heating planet.
It's an April day in 2001 and I sit across from the chief of hepatology of Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia as he shares the conclusions of various diagnostic procedures brought on by some recent health difficulties.
"David, you have a disease called Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC), which is a progressive narrowing of the bile ducts."
Hmm. Okay. That doesn't sound all that bad, right? Okay, I'm not even sure what bile ducts do or where they are located, but...
"So," the doc continues, "What it comes down to is that you will eventually need a liver transplant, and there's nothing we can do to prevent that."
Shock. Utter shock. You see, I wasn't feeling any symptoms of this disease, this PSC. None at all. I'd been dealing with an unrelated medical matter and labs revealed that something was off with my liver numbers and further investigation revealed the PSC.
It took me about a month to get over the shock of my diagnosis. And then... well... I just got on with living my life mostly as if nothing had changed. Since I had no symptoms (they would begin to kick in about three years down the road—fatigue, itching, jaundice) and could do nothing to prevent the disease progression, it was as if I didn't have a disease at all.
I wasn't "there" yet.
Back to Los Angeles. Full Disclosure: I know much more about climate change than the average person. I researched it intensively and wrote 15 published articles back in 2012-2015. Then... I mostly gave up writing about it. Why? Because it gradually became apparent that mere information—no matter how compellingly or creatively expressed—was NOT going to move most people to take significant action.
Why? Because most people would not be "there" for years and decades to come? Sure, climate change would become more and more symptomatic, but the Earth is a big place. An increasingly occurring wildfire here or there, a superstorm here or there, a superdrought here or there, still ends up leaving the vast majority of folks not being obviously and viscerally impacted.
I mean... at least at first.
January, 2006. Dr. Susan Althoff—one of three surgeons who performed the liver transplant—shoots me a steely look: "David, we WILL get you through this."
I am laying on my bed in the liver-transplant wing of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. My youngest brother is also in this wing since, about a week before, he donated half of his liver to me (It's called a Live Donor Transplant).
So now I've got a new half-a-liver (which, incredibly, will grow to a 100% liver in about a month's time, as will my brother's remaining half-a-liver). The problem is that my body has so far rejected my new liver. This is not particularly uncommon. Suddenly, there is a huge hunk of "foreign" tissue inside of me, and my body's immune system is trying to eject it. There are drugs for this, which I am now taking and will be taking for the rest of my life.
But these drugs are being overwhelmed, and so they put me on the next protocol—high dose steroids. And—wheeeeee!—the steroids DO give me drug-induced diabetes but are not enough to turn the tide. Dr. Althoff has just entered to give me that piece of bad news. I am beyond exhausted and respond with some expression of despair and hopelessness.
Dr. Althoff responds with that steely look (see above) and explains: "We have one more protocol called OKT-3 (when they bring out the letters-and-numbers meds, you know it's serious). We've only used it three times in the last year. You'll know it's working if you get a high fever and start to feel really, really sick."
Twelve hours later, I am shivering under a special, ice-filled blanket. I have a high fever and feel quite sick, wrecked even. The OKT-3 is apparently working.
Finally, I am "there." Boy-oh-boy, am I there. Right there. Exactly there. Everything else in the world disappears. Every single thing other than wanting this to stop and wanting to get better and feel better. I would do anything.
Right now, there are obviously many thousands of people in Los Angeles who are "there." Right there. Exactly there. They are directly experiencing one of the scientifically understood symptoms of a fossil fuel-supercharged, heating planet. Most of them, I am sure, would do anything to make it stop and to make things better.
Even the ones who—subject to the unceasing and enormously financed propaganda of fossil fuel corporations and the governments and political parties that they have purchased—have denied the reality of human-caused climate change (as well as the ones—let us not forget—who blandly "believe" it, but have placed it way down on the list of concerns) will be less likely to dismiss the scientific reports that will be published finding that the intensity of these fires was 20% or 40% or 75% more likely to have happened due to the inexorably heating planet. These reports will be coming. This is certain.
Because—just like me under that ice blanket—they are finally "there," their nervous systems violated and assaulted. Their world turned upside down.
I am forever grateful to my brother. Yes, my situation was serious. But I was only one person. And I was willing to go along with the science. And I only needed one other person (with a compatible blood-type!!) to step up. And, lastly, as my fatigue increased and my weight melted away and my eyes and skin turned yellow, I was brought at least partially "there" and became willing to undergo fairly extreme and grueling duress to set things right.
But when it comes to setting things right climate-wise, there are 8.2 billion of us. Most are ceaselessly occupied trying to make ends meet. Many are swayed by the flat-out disinformation campaigns of those wishing to keep things as they are. Most—though this ratio will gradually swing the other way—are not yet nearly "there" in terms of direct-and-undeniable climate impacts.
This is a stark brew.
Things can get stark under the ice blanket or the thousand-and-one other grueling demands of major surgery and recovery (I needed a follow-up surgery in 2010 which was—I kid you not—at least 200% more difficult than the transplant. Once things are allowed to go a great degree out-of-balance, it becomes much more likely that unforeseen complications and collapses will ensue.)
I could have died during my transplant in 2006. I very nearly did die in the 2010 surgery.
Some people have died in the LA fires. The body count continues to grow. Many, many more have lost now-uninsurable homes, cars, pets, etc. The "stark brew" cited above all but assures that millions more people will die before anything close to enough "there-ness" occurs throughout the populace to prompt enough people to stand for change—even the grueling and deeply inconvenient change that is demanded by the physics of Earth.
I wish it were different. So do many people whom I know.
But it isn't different.
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Scientific Community Issues Fresh Warning to Congress as 'Radical' Trump Returns
Over 50,000 scientists and supporters called on Congress to "defend against Trump's anti-science actions."
Jan 13, 2025
With a president-elect who has called the climate crisis a "hoax" and vowed to gut fossil fuel drilling regulations poised to take office in one week, more than 50,000 scientists and advocates on Monday implored U.S. lawmakers to consider the incoming administration's "respect for science" as they vote on Cabinet nominees and provide oversight of the Trump White House over the next four years.
Organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a petition signed by 50,588 scientists and experts was sent to every member of Congress, asking them to "defend the science and scientists that keep Americans safe" after President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20.
The Republican leader's agenda, and the policies outlined in the right-wing policymaking plan Project 2025, threaten to "eviscerate the protections that Americans count on and support," reads the petition.
During his first administration, Trump rolled back the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) ability to develop regulations under the Clean Air Act and repealed the Clean Water Rule, and he and his nominee for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have signaled they would purge the ranks of the Food and Drug Administration. Researchers at the EPA are also bracing for a "swift and unprecedented" upheaval, with Trump expected to repeal vehicle and methane emissions regulations.
During his presidential campaign, Trump asked oil executives for $1 billion in donations, promising to repay them by gutting President Joe Biden's climate regulations.
"Rolling back science-based policies and silencing scientists has the potential to turn back the clock on the immense progress science has made over past decades, jeopardizing public health, economic stability, national security, and the future livability of the climate."
"The reason behind the Trump administration's radical proposals to sideline science and scientists is crystal clear: Science stands in the way of polluters and special interests unleashing unprecedented amounts of pollution that would put short-term profits over people, no matter the cost to current and future generations of Americans," reads the petition sent to Congress.
The petition calls on lawmakers to:
- Oppose anti-science nominees to any federal agency who do not agree on the record to follow and/or implement a scientific integrity policy in their agency;
- Oppose the elimination of federal agencies or their staff directly or indirectly including through draconian budget cuts, reclassifying staff, or abruptly moving agency headquarters, all of which are a transparent and explicit effort to decimate scientific expertise and decision-making; and
- Defend the safeguards that protect the health and safety of people across the United States, especially those overburdened by pollution, including the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
The petition was bolstered by an open letter sent to 99 U.S. senators, including those sitting on committees that will play a significant role in approving or blocking Trump's Cabinet nominees.
The letter, also sent Monday and signed by a coalition of 28 organizations, calls on senators to "ensure nominees are only confirmed if they have the necessary qualifications to succeed in their roles, do not have conflicts of interest, accept established science related to their agency's mission, and value the role of rigorous science, free from political interference, in government decision-making."
Trump's nominees including former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, an oil drilling proponent, for interior secretary; fracking firm CEO Chris Wright for energy secretary; and former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), who repeatedly voted against Clean Air Act standards, as EPA administrator.
"Agency leaders must respond effectively to a variety of threats, from cyberattacks to hurricanes and pandemics," reads the letter, signed by the Endangered Species Coalition, Greenpeace USA, and the National Resources Defense Council. "To do so, they must value science and consider evidence that can help them make well-informed decisions. Our organizations urge you to consider nominees' respect for science in confirmation hearings and votes."
The groups called on senators to only confirm nominees who are free of conflicts of interest and who have relevant qualifications, such as "academic degrees and respect for the mission of the agency or program they are nominated to lead."
Agency leaders, they said, should also demonstrate respect for scientific integrity: "the adherence to professional practices, ethical behavior, and the principles of honesty and objectivity when conducting, managing, using the results of, and communicating about science and scientific activities."
The idea of allowing scientists to work without fear of political interference "has long had bipartisan support," noted the groups, which quoted Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) as saying at a hearing on the Scientific Integrity Act in 2019, "Scientific findings are often relied upon by policymakers to make important decisions that affect the lives of millions of Americans... To maintain the public's trust, there must be a high degree of integrity and transparency in the scientific process."
Agency leaders who interfere with scientific research or who allow their conflicts of interest to interfere with regulating the oil and gas industry, Big Pharma, and public health agencies "would be disastrous for our nation," said the groups, as they would be likely to ignore or misrepresent "scientific evidence in order to make it appear that an appointee's preferred course of action is the clear solution."
"This could take the form of cherry-picking evidence based on ideology or actively advancing misinformation, with potentially deadly results," wrote the groups. "For instance, if a vaccine were developed in response to a new pandemic, as it was during the triumphant Operation Warp Speed of the first Trump administration, an agency leader might hamper vaccine uptake by emphasizing the very small proportion of vaccine recipients who suffered a side effect serious enough to require medical attention without comparing it to the far larger number of severe illnesses averted."
At upcoming confirmation hearings, the groups urged senators to ask nominees whether they commit to: upholding scientific integrity, "ensuring that the findings of scientific research conducted by your agency will be communicated accurately," and using "the best available scientific evidence to inform decisions and evidence-based policies."
"Rolling back science-based policies and silencing scientists has the potential to turn back the clock on the immense progress science has made over past decades, jeopardizing public health, economic stability, national security, and the future livability of the climate," said Dr. Jennifer Jones, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS.
"Protecting science means protecting people—full stop," said Jones. "The broad consensus among scientists demonstrates the urgency we all feel to protect independent science in government decision-making."
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