The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal agencies have altered or removed hundreds of pages of HIV-related information on their websites, part of a government-wide purge of content that conflicts with President Donald Trump's policy priorities. Much of the deleted information relates to populations disproportionately affected by HIV — especially transgender people — in keeping with Trump's January 20 executive orders to end "gender ideology" and "DEI" (diversity, equity, and inclusion).
HIV policy experts condemned the purges.
"Access to this information is crucial for infectious diseases and HIV health care professionals who care for people with HIV and members of the LGBTQ community and is critical to efforts to end the HIV epidemic," Infectious Diseases Society of America President Dr. Tina Tan and HIV Medicine Association chair Dr. Colleen Kelley said in a statement. "This is especially important as diseases such as HIV, mpox, sexually transmitted infections, and other illnesses threaten public health and impact the entire population."
In late January, CDC employees received an email instructing them to avoid references to "gender ideology" and to recognize only two sexes, NBC News reported. HIV and STI content appear to have been caught up in the effort to scrub banned material. "There's just so much gender content in HIV that we have to take everything down in order to meet the deadline," an anonymous staffer told NBC.
Some of the material, including HIV surveillance data, has since been reinstated without apparent changes. Other pages have been replaced with revised versions that omit any mention of transgender people, including a Vital Signs report on Ending the HIV Epidemic. The CDC website does still include content about gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. A page on smoking cessation, for example, now refers to "LGBQ+" instead of "LGBTQ+" people.
Some searches related to HIV prevention and epidemiology now return either a 404 "page not found" error or an explanation that the content is temporarily offline to comply with executive orders. Among the "not found" content is a series of fact sheets with HIV statistics for key at-risk populations, including gay and bisexual men, Black people, Latino people, and transgender people. Also missing is the agency's widely used PrEP guidance. Other content has been taken offline entirely ("site can't be reached"), including HIV risk estimator and risk reduction tools. The Internet Archive has saved some of the deleted content and original versions of altered material.
STI content appears largely intact and still includes a page on STI treatment for transgender and gender-diverse people. The CDC's guidelines for doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis (doxyPEP) to prevent STIs was taken down briefly but is now back up with no obvious alterations. The CDC website still includes basic information about mpox, but with no indication that gay and bisexual men account for most cases in the United States and are advised to get vaccinated.
"CDC has authoritative, evidence-based, and vital information about treatment and prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections," Dr. Paul Sax, director of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, told the Bay Area Reporter. "Just last week, while preparing a presentation to teach other clinicians, I looked up the most recent version of the HIV PrEP guidelines on the CDC site. These are no longer available. These are important resources for clinicians and patients alike. Let's hope they become available again soon."
Other federal agencies
The Department of Health and Human Service's HIV.gov website has undergone more focused editing and includes no mention of the presidential orders on its home page. The site still features a set of population-based HIV fact sheets from the National Institutes of Health, but the one about transgender people is no longer included. Similarly, among more than a dozen HIV awareness days for various affected populations, National Transgender HIV Testing Day appears to be the only one missing. Awareness days for Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, Caribbean, Latinx, and Native communities remain, suggesting that trans people specifically — rather than DEI more broadly — are the primary target.
HIV treatment information has generally fared better, but has also seen some changes. The DHHS Guidelines for the Use of Antiretroviral Agents in Adults and Adolescents With HIV — the federal government's primary treatment resource for clinicians — were revised in September with an updated section on "Transgender People With HIV." That section is still listed on the guidelines' "What's New" landing page, but clicking through on the link returns a 404 page not found error.
The DHHS Perinatal HIV Clinical Guidelines continue to refer to "pregnant people" and still include a note about referring to transgender men and gender-diverse individuals by their preferred terminology. But clicking on a link to "Perinatal HIV Prevention for Transgender and Gender-Diverse People Assigned Female at Birth" returns a 404 error.
"The guidelines on [HIV] testing, prevention, and treatment are used all the time by practitioners not only in the U.S. but globally," Dr. Carlos del Rio of Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta told the B.A.R. "Pretending that trans people don't exist and thus we should not talk about them is not only inhumane but also bad for HIV prevention and care, as trans people have some of the highest risk for HIV."
As the B.A.R. reported last week, the Trump administration stopped funding for PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which provides HIV prevention, testing and treatment services in low-income countries. After a public outcry, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver allowing clinicians to offer life-saving medication, but media have reported that some providers say they are unable to continue their work. The PEPFAR website, which was down last week, was back up at the time of this report, even as its parent agency, USAID, is under attack by Trump and Elon Musk, who is heading up the White House's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE for short, and driving the shutdown of the international aid agency.
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