The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has agreed to restore webpages containing resources for health issues that affect the LGBTQ+ community and information on opioid use by women to settle a lawsuit brought by a collection of medical organizations and public health nonprofits.
Dr. John Bramhall, president of the of the board of trustees for the Washington State Medical Association, one of the organizations that brought the lawsuit, said Tuesday that the settlement had achieved two victories.
"It puts the information back where it should be, so that our member physicians and the community can use it," Bramhall said. "And it also secondarily raises an issue that people may not have been aware of; most people wouldn't be aware that these sites were being messed with, now they will."
The settlement comes after the Department of Health and Human Services removed dozens of webpages from its websites earlier this year to comply with executive orders signed by President Donald Trump, titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism" and "Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government and Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing."
The executive orders stated that the federal government would only recognize someone's "immutable biological classification" as either male or female and called for federal agencies to "remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology."
The removed information included a June 2024 Public Health Advisory from then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy where he declared gun violence a national public health crisis and a report titled "Responding to transgender victims of sexual assault."
The removed research also included reports titled "Minority Veteran Care," "Resources for LGBTQ Youth Experiencing Homelessness" and "Facts about LGBT Youth Suicide."
Those who attempted to access the websites received a message that said, "The page you're looking for was not found." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also temporarily added a note to its website which said the "CDC's website is being modified to comply with President Trump's Executive Orders."
Bramhall said he couldn't speculate how the agency decided which pages were removed, though he said it "seemed like there were specific keywords that guided which sites were going to be taken down, which webpages were going to be deleted."
"And these typically have to do with vaccination requirements, with STI, with gender and disparities in care," Bramhall said. "So, the usual sort of buzzwords that the administration has been excited about have filtered down into a deletion of scientific information that is used by doctors and nurses to treat and to guide people on these issues. So the issues don't go away, but the information that they use has gone away."
While the Department of Health and Human Services did not provide notice on which websites would be removed, according to Bramhall, physicians began to notice in the spring that websites they once routinely used to obtain information for patient treatment had begun to disappear.
"There had been no information about what changes were going to be made; there was no warning, so they disappeared," Bramhall said.
As more and more physicians began to notice the missing information, Bramhall said it "became clear" that hundreds of previously used websites had vanished.
"This is information that's used by our members on a daily basis, sometimes on an hourly basis, to help guide the therapy and treatment of our patients," Bramhall said. "And it soon became clear that what was necessary was a lawsuit."
According to the initial complaint, one member of the WSMA described the scope of the information removed as "breathtaking," while another said, "If the CDC isn't able to publish information about new virus outbreaks, the consequences will be grave, for obvious reasons."
In a statement Tuesday, Dr. James Polo, president of the Washington Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which joined the lawsuit, said that "trust is at the core of pediatrics - parents trust us to put their children first, and we rely on accurate data to guide their care.
"When critical health information disappeared overnight, that trust was undermined and children's health was put at risk," Polo said.
While the settlement requires the Department of Health and Human Services to restore the information, Bramhall considers the agreement a "narrow victory."
"We still have an administration that is guided more by gut than by science. We still have an administration that is attacking universities, that's defunding the NIH, that's taking down information about subjects that they feel uncomfortable with," Bramhall said.