Boom: Federal judge orders CDC, NIH & FDA to restore websites & datasets in response to DFA lawsuit

Chris Geidner ‪@chrisgeidner.bsky.social‬

BREAKING: In response to doctors' lawsuit, Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, orders CDC, NIH, and FDA to put back up websites and datasets cited by the doctors in their lawsuit as having been relied upon and pulled down without notice.

February 11, 2025 at 12:15 PM

From the opinion:

Doctors for America (“DFA”) moves to temporarily restrain three agencies of the United States government from further removing or modifying health-related webpages and datasets— and to compel them to restore webpages and datasets that they have already removed or modified—because DFA and its members (physicians, medical trainees, and other health care professionals) use the webpages regularly in treating patients and conducting research. DFA argues that the removal of these webpages violates the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) and, in some cases, the Paperwork Reduction Act (“PRA”), and that DFA and its members are and will continue to be irreparably harmed by the lack of access to the information. For the reasons that follow, the Court will grant plaintiff’s motion for a temporary restraining order.

As a reminder, I'm on the Board of Directors of Doctors for America, but my own work helping archive the contents/data of both the CDC & FDA websites was done independently of DFA.

Of course the next big concern is whether the Musk/Trump Regime will actually comply with this or other court rulings or not, but in the meantime this is a huge victory for sanity.

I should also note that the judge in the case was less than amused by one of the more asinine arguments made by the Musk/Trump Regime: That the very fact that 3rd parties such as the Internet Archive happened to back up some (most?) of what they took offline justified them doing so:

Defendants contend that the removal of the webpages does not constitute irreparable harm because DFA members can still access some of the removed webpages through the Wayback Machine, an archival website. See Opp’n at 4. The Court is not persuaded. The Wayback Machine does not capture every webpage, and there is no information to suggest that it has archived each removed webpage. 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. See Reply at 3–4.