On 8 January I received an email from my boss at the health department where I work on social epidemiology. It was a message relayed from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). ‘Data is the oxygen of public health,’ it said, ‘essential for improving health and saving lives.’ On 31 January, most, if not all, public health data were purged from the CDC’s website. Within hours of the erasure, health departments were stalled. If data were the oxygen of public health, then all the oxygen had just been sucked out of the room.
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