The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took offline recommendations on how doctors should treat sexually transmitted infections and vaccinate adults Friday, as part of a sweeping purge of all mentions of “gender” from federal websites ordered by the Trump administration this week.
“Doctors in every community in America rely on these treatment guidelines to know what tests to run, to know what antibiotic will work on which infection, and how to avoid worsening antibiotic resistance,” said David C. Harvey, head of the National Coalition of STD Directors, in a statement to CBS News.
Multiple federal health officials said that agency staff had been racing Friday to meet a 5 p.m. deadline set by the Office of Personnel Management, to implement President Trump’s executive order that the federal government now only recognizes “two sexes, male and female.”
Web pages that could not be immediately reworded to strip out all mentions of gender, like those aimed at transgender people, were taken down to be reworked.
“People will get sick. And, especially in cases like congenital syphilis where you cannot lose a day to treat, babies will die,” said Harvey.
Some changes were minor and kept web pages online, like rewording information about Zika virus from saying “pregnant person” to “pregnant woman” instead.
Others have resulted in gutting key parts of the agency’s website. Data from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a nationwide survey of high school students about mental health, substance abuse and violence, were also wiped from the website.
The last round of the survey’s results had highlighted worsening mental health and violence affecting LGBTQ high school students.
Also pulled offline was much of the CDC’s adult immunization guidance, which referenced transgender and nonbinary people as part of carefully crafted recommendations for some vaccines passed by a panel of the agency’s outside advisers.
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Other health agencies were also affected by the rewrites.
Data published by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion tracking progress to meet federal goals like reducing the bullying of transgender students and curbing the proportion of gay high school students using illegal drugs were deleted.
Announcements and guidance by the Food and Drug Administration mentioning gender were either rewritten to swap for references to sex or scrubbed, like a now-deleted 2023 move by the agency that had been intended to make it easier for gay and bisexual men to donate blood.
Nonprofits, hospitals and health departments ordered to comply
Letters obtained by CBS News sent to nonprofits and state and local health departments receiving federal health dollars also left some grant recipients confused.
One letter suggested that all their staff and communications would also be forced to comply with the Trump administration’s sweeping new rules banning gender from all their activities, like dropping the mention of pronouns from email signatures and removing gender from their websites as a condition of continuing to receive federal funds.
Another targeted mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion, saying that similar to federal rules, they also were now required to “immediately terminate, to the maximum extent, all programs, personnel, activities, or contracts promoting” those ideas “at every level and activity, regardless of your location or the citizenship of employees or contracts” supported by the funds.
Some hospitals also said this week they are moving to suspend medications and procedures for youth seeking gender-affirming care, following an executive order signed on Tuesday by President Trump to curb procedures and prescriptions for gender transitions in minors.
“Children’s National is committed to providing compassionate and comprehensive care in accordance with the law. As a result, we are currently pausing all puberty blockers and hormone therapy prescriptions for transgender youth patients,” Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. said in a statement Thursday.
The hospital already did not perform gender transition surgery for minors, a spokesperson said. They did not comment on how many patients would be impacted by the pause.
Not all children’s hospitals say they are stopping gender-affirming care. Statements released by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of Michigan Health and Children’s Hospital of Chicago said they were still assessing the impact of the order.
“Our team will continue to advocate for access to medically necessary care, grounded in science and compassion for the patient-families we are so privileged to serve,” said a spokesperson for Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago in a statement.
The Trump administration this week also took down web pages outlining federal civil rights guidance on gender-affirming care for youth, effectively ending a Biden administration position that had criticized attempts to restrict “this potentially livesaving care.”
