Researchers rush to preserve federal health databases before they disappear from US government websites

A group of researchers and students at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health are scraping and downloading data related to health equity from U.S. government agency websites before they disappear. Their goal is to make the downloaded data publicly available through repositories such as the Harvard Dataverse.

The new Trump administration has at least temporality halted most communications from the Department of Health and Human Services and has begun taking down government websites, including many pages that include DEI initiatives. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey site, which monitors health behaviors of high-school students, including sexual behavior, mental health and tobacco use, is no longer available.

Health researchers worry that more of their trusted federal health databases could disappear in the coming hours and days. It’s not clear whether the changes are permanent or the websites will once again become available.

“In my lifetime, in the United States I don’t know of another situation where researchers have been this concerned about losing access to data that they’ve had access to their whole career,” says Jonathan Gilmour, a data scientist at the Chan School who is researching human health impacts of climate change. “It’s dire.”

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Source: The Journalist's Resource, 31 January 2025