CDC orders mass retraction and revision of submitted research

I wonder how will this affect private institutions and private publications?

I could imagine people moving away from CDC into private sector, and considering it's long been a "model" US view that things progress best when done in a free market, it might actually be a boon to medical research.

But, a couple of quick searches tells me 1/3rd of healthcare costs per person comes from the federal government (data from 2023), and NIH puts majority of it's $48B budget towards external (83%) and internal (11%) research.

Obviously, only some research would have (or need to have) the forbidden terminology, so perhaps nothing really happens.

Edit: and lest it remains unsaid, let's also take this with a grain of salt until it comes out from multiple sources or officially.

It's going to be NASA next isn't it, because of climate change and the need to remove any evidence of that and other environmental changes...

I am not a lawyer but this CDC order seems contrary to Trump’s recent Executive Order “RESTORING FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND ENDING FEDERAL CENSORSHIP”.

This Executive Order states in part: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.

… Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to: (a) secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;

(b) ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen; …

Sec. 3. Ending Censorship of Protected Speech. (a) No Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee, or agent may act or use any Federal resources in a manner contrary to section 2 of this order.”

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/rest...

I'm assuming at this point refusing will be a badge of honour but one which is terminal for federal funding, in this 4 year term if not longer. You would need very high confidence in your future career trajectory to do that.

We had a mini storm over government censorship of CSIRO science in Australia and it got pretty ugly, but this is much uglier.

If they do the same for NSF, earth sciences, DoE and AGW it's going to be pretty nasty.

I don't even have to agree with the science. This kind of mass bad-topic-ban is really unhelpful. I wonder if the editorial boards are also going to put up a fight? I can imagine some kind of "retracted because of Trump policy, not because the peer review process asked for it" markers.

Genetics, and Lysenkoism comes to mind. A stain on soviet science which echoed down the years.

biologically male, biologically female

The trans stuff has definitely been controversial, but those phrases are definitely not "woke"?

Remember how a few days ago, headlines were exploding how DeepSeek wouldn't answer questions about Tiananmen Square and other "sensitive topics"?

Well, welcome to the inside part of a great wall in the making. Thoughts and prayers y'all.

Xi Jinping and his colleagues must be opening a champagne bottle over the US being this stupid. They could have never imagined an enemy so retarded

Overtures of fascism. I expect we’ll see thinly-veiled euphemisms and rephrasings that just evade the banned list, if not outright refusal. Ultimately this falls short for the same reason that simple filters of all kinds fail in their (apparent) objective, to the extent that it doesn’t even feel like the point is to actually stop the discussion, but rather to send a message.

It's a shame most of that research is digital, I'm sure they would have preferred a public book burning like in die gut old days.

If the US chooses to opt out of science research, China and others will not.

That doesn’t bode well for the US.

The right: "free speech for me but not for thee."