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This morning, i heard on the public health reddit that the HIV page at cdc.gov had been scrubbed. Sure enough, the landing page was there, but all links to information about programs, treatment, data were gone.

Then we started to hear that all CDC was going to be removing data. Whole data sets. I started looking, and the Social Vulnerability Index, which identifies geographic areas that are vulnerable to climate, economic, or health-related disasters, it was gone.

The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which is a national survey that helps identify things like smoking prevalence, healthcare access, are people meeting nutrtion guidelines, was gone. I had just downloaded that dataset and the documentation on Tuesday to run some stats on colorectal cancer screening in my state. It was now gone.

My colleagues at the health department started messaging each other. Were they also having troubles finding data? People on reddit were frantically trying to download datasets, comparing what they already had. For fuck's sake, the Census website and data was going down. The goddamn Census.

There are some heroes, like the good people at the r/DataHoarders subreddit who had heard rumblings earlier this week and had started scrapping the entire CDC website. The End of Term Archive had already been archiving federal websites and data for months, and are getting those datasets up on GitHub.

But this is unprecedented. This is fascism. This is an authoritarian regime removing public data from access to make sure theres nothing out there that can conflict with their message.

This is not normal.