MANKATO — The federal government’s removal of information from its websites makes it harder to educate patients on critical health issues, said a local health center’s communications coordinator.
Molly Gehrke’s job at Open Door Health Center includes coming up with weekly and monthly awareness campaigns. The goal is to give patients and the community a better understanding of health topics ranging from chronic disease prevention to immunizations to maternal health issues.
Federal websites used to be good resources for her, offering toolkits and links to research on issues relevant to Open Door’s patient population.
This year, however, Gehrke has seen instances of toolkits not being updated, pages being removed and links disappearing.
“If health centers around the country are going to focus on better health outcomes for patients with chronic disease and improve primary care for all Americans, as described in the goals of the new administration, education tools need to be made available,” she said.
President Donald Trump’s established a Make America Healthy Again Commission after returning to office, tasking it with investigating and addressing the root causes of chronic diseases. Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, chairs the commission.
Open Door recently sent a letter written by Gehrke to The Free Press describing what she was seeing with federal government web pages and why it’s making community health education more difficult. In her letter Gehrke uses National Infant Immunization Week and Black Maternal Health Week as examples of slimmed down or eliminated campaigns on federal government sites.
In December 2024, before Trump took office, the Health Resources & Services Administration had a robust section on its site about Black maternal health, according to a search using theWayback Machine. It shared data on how Black, American Indian/Alaska Native and non-Hispanic Native Hawaaian and Pacific Islander women are between two to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as non-Hispanic white women. Elsewhere it spotlighted action steps to address the higher mortality rates, among other resources.
Going to the same link now yields a “page not found” message. The page didn’t appear to be available anywhere else on the government agency’s webpage.
Another example of changes can be found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s site. A CDC Women’s Health page still notes “many girls around the world face challenges to their health and well-being” at the top now, but in late 2024 it had an added line stating “in many places, girls are disadvantaged by discrimination rooted in cultural beliefs and ideas about gender.”
The 2024 page had a section about ending gender-based violence prominently displayed near the top of the page. That section was gone as of Sunday.
Open Door is a Federally Qualified Health Center, or FQHC, considered a safety net clinic for uninsured and underinsured patients. It serves a diverse patient population, making information about health disparities and strategies to close gaps particularly important to it.
Health education materials can make a difference, Gehrke wrote in her letter.
The federal government should not be eliminating critical information and ignoring decades of medical guidance because of perceived ideological differences,” she stated. “These actions have set back the goals of the current administration by making it more difficult for the public to understand the growing health crisis in America.”