A federal judge appointed by a Republican President has castigated Trump administration officials — and ordered them to immediately restore public health websites that they abruptly abruptly shut down.
The lawsuit against the website removal, brought by a group of physicians known as Doctors for America, concerns sites operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. Doctors for America says the scrubbing of the sites makes it more difficult for them to treat patients.
U.S. District Judge John Bates, appointed by George W Bush, agreed. He ordered the government to restore the pages by the end of the day of his ruling (Tuesday Feb. 11).
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The TL;DR of Bates’ ruling? It “was done without any public rationale, recourse or ability to challenge the decisions, despite laws and regulations that typically require them,” as Politico summarized.
Sites removed by Trump officials concern HIV care, plus information on contraception drugs and student health. In their lawsuit filed against the Office for Personnel Management, HHS, CDC, and the FDA, Doctors for America says the removal of websites offering them guidance on these subjects is creating confusion, which eats up time that is better spent treating patients.
Justice Department attorneys defended the government’s decision to remove the sites, saying doctors could still access the information by using the Wayback Machine, which archives offline websites. But that didn’t fly with the judge.
“The Wayback Machine does not capture every webpage, and there is no information to suggest that is has archived each removed webpage,” Bates wrote. “Additionally, pages archived on the Wayback Machine do not appear on search engines. In other words, a particular archived webpage is only viewable to a provider if the provider knows that the Wayback Machine exists and had recorded the pre-removal URL of the requested webpage.”
