Censorship is back at the CDC, Inside Medicine has learned. A new table provided by an active agency employee listed nearly two dozen webpages that are now offline. Many of the 22 removed sites appear to have been taken down recently, having been online as recently as earlier this month, an Inside Medicine analysis revealed. Some of the removed sites may have been removed within the last few days, while others may have been offline for far longer, but flew under the radar. In some cases, agency staffers have been specifically instructed to remove websites, I was told. Others were discovered by employees in the course of their work, such as a seemingly random RSV surveillance page which is now offline.

The complete list (as of September 20, 2025) of censored CDC pages, however, is anything but random.


As you can see, many, if not most, of the removed pages have obvious tie-ins to topics known to be disfavored by the Trump administration, including some on the care of LGBTQ+ people, health equity issues related to a variety of diseases or disabilities, sexually transmitted infections, and related educational resources.

But the list of censored resources also includes a couple of head-scratchers, like two sites with information on parasitic infections (malaria and cystoisosporiasis). Why those? I asked the CDC whistleblower who provided us with the list. She wasn’t exactly sure, but floated an explanation. “LOL, we think it's because the pages mention ‘asexual reproduction’ of parasites.” Another CDC employee had heard the same theory. The theory sounds credible. Indeed, one of the other currently shuttered sites is entitled “Understanding Asexuality.” If this explanation is correct, this would align with previous examples of censorship implemented by the Trump administration earlier this year, including the immediate cancellation of NIH grants that included the text “trans,” even though in some cases the appearance of those five terrifying letters were part of other “non-offensive” scientific words—such as neurotransmitters or transmission—which apparently got caught up in wide-net searches for material to banish.

Overall, this latest action appears to be yet another angle in the administration's ongoing attack not only on our public health infrastructure, but on the mission-critical work carried out by CDC employees themselves. “The agency is so compromised and the scientists are hostage,” Dr. Demetre Daskalakis told Inside Medicine when shown the list. Dr. Daskalakis recently resigned as the CDC’s Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. He has spent the last several weeks advocating for beleaguered scientists who remain in the agency, and, more broadly, for a return to rigorous science within HHS.

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We’ve been here before.
Back in late January, the Trump Administration implemented an astonishing regime of unprecedented censorship at the CDC, some of which was first broken here in Inside Medicine. At that time, messages appeared on some of the removed websites and pages explicitly stating that the sites had been removed in order to be scrubbed of any terminology that the administration deemed to be offensive—that is, whatever it considered “woke ideology.” Naturally, the censored pages included many essential public resources, from vaccine schedules to health information for treating LGBTQ+ persons. Fortunately, a successful lawsuit filed by Doctors For America directly led to the restoration of those resources, which was welcome proof that our legal system was still functioning and that the administration was continuing to abide by its rulings. Some expected a protracted appeal process, but the Trump administration surprised many (myself included) when it stood down and moved on to other priorities in its attack on our nation’s public health infrastructure. This time, however, no such explanations appear on the shuttered sites. Whether the administration feels like fighting harder this time remains to be seen.

Why has the Trump administration returned to CDC website censorship now? That’s unclear. But this new development coincides with a period in which the administration has shown renewed interested in testing the limits of its censorship powers. However, it’s also important to remember that the successful Doctors For America lawsuit did not rely on First Amendment arguments—indeed, the federal government can determine the speech and messaging of its own agencies. Rather, the Doctors For America win on behalf of public health (and the public) rested on administrative law. The prevailing argument was that since the public relies on these resources, the federal government cannot suddenly remove them without notice or justification. A similar argument may win another round of legal battles, ones we might expect to soon materialize if the websites are not quickly restored.