The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has asked its staff to withdraw any scientific papers currently under consideration for internal or external publication so that certain words can be removed, according to several reports.
The decision was first reported by The Washington Post, with more details provided by Inside Medicine on Substack.
Words that no longer comply with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which is designed to end “all agency programs that use taxpayer money to promote or reflect gender ideology," are to be removed, according to the Post.
Terms that will be considered for removal include: gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male and biologically female, according to a screenshot posted by Inside Medicine.
The revision has been underway since the Office of Personnel Management issued guidance on the topic last week, according to the Post, which obtained a copy of the memo.
Jan. 31, the CDC's chief science officer sent an internal email that informed the agency’s division heads that all papers written or co-written by CDC scientists are being withdrawn and that agency scientists should take their names off of papers they are collaborating on with external scientists, Reuters reported.
A yellow banner at the top of the CDC’s website currently states: “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”
The move is a continuation of the communications freeze that Trump imposed on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). That freeze affects all HHS divisions, including the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, where no new studies are being initiated at this time.
Since it was first imposed about two weeks ago, some parts of the freeze have thawed, an HHS spokesperson told Fierce Biotech in an email late on Feb. 3.
"HHS has approved numerous communications related to critical health and safety needs and will continue to do so," the spokesperson said. "There are several types of external communications that are no longer subject to the pause. All HHS divisions have been given clear guidance on how to seek approval for any other type of mass communication."
The HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs is also "now more flexible with communications as HHS and its divisions work to align with President Trump’s agenda," the spokesperson added.
The publication withdrawal also aligns with other EOs signed by Trump, including a ban on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and a proclamation that there are only two biological sexes, male and female. The latter order was opposed by medical and legal experts, according to ABC News.
Health agencies have seen many major changes since Trump’s inauguration, including the removal of web pages related to diversity and the scrubbing of numerous online databases.
It's not immediately clear how agency scientists will publish research on diseases that disproportionately impact groups who can no longer be named. For example, both HIV and mpox more commonly affect members of the LGBTQ community in the U.S., though everyone is susceptible to infection.
Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:30 p.m. ET on Feb. 4 to include a statement from the HHS about the agency's communications freeze.