Canadian residents are racing to save the data in Trump's crosshairs
CBC
The call to Angela Rasmussen came out of the blue and posed a troubling question. Had she heard the rumour that key data sets would be removed from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website the next day?
It's something Rasmussen had thought could never happen.
"It had never really been thought of before that CDC would actually start deleting some of these crucial public health data sets," said the University of Saskatchewan virologist. "These data are really, really important for everybody's health — not just in the U.S. but around the world."
The following day, Jan. 31, Rasmussen started to see data disappear. She knew she needed to take action.
Rasmussen reached out to a bioinformatician friend, who knew how to preserve data and make backup copies of websites. With others, they scrambled to preserve the data in case it was deleted.
"We set about archiving the entire CDC website," said Rasmussen.
Since then, Rasmussen and her colleague have teamed up with others like American health-care data analyst Charles Gaba and turned their attention to other sites with health data, preserving information from departments and agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Rasmussen said the publication of some studies, such as three that would shed light on H5N1 bird flu, also appear to be affected by the change of administration.
Rasmussen is just one of several Canadian residents who have joined what has become an international guerilla archiving effort to preserve copies of U.S. government web pages and data being rapidly taken offline by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration.
An analysis by the New York Times identified thousands of pages taken down in the days following Trump's inauguration, in part as a result of Trump's executive order targeting diversity initiatives.
Among the pages observers have seen disappear are ones that monitor HIV infections, deal with health risks for youth and contain census data, education data and information about assisted reproduction technologies. A website containing the names of those charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was also removed.
A comparison of the U.S.data.gov home page on Jan. 17, before Trump's inauguration, and Wednesday, shows 522 fewer data sets.
Some commenters on social media liken the disappearing data to book burning in the 1930s.
Asked about the changes to the CDC's website, the agency said it is part of changes across the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
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