Healthbeat is taking a break for the holidays. We'll be back in 2026 with some exciting changes for this newsletter. See you next year!

A few weeks ago, I spoke with John Weiser, a researcher and doctor who has treated people with HIV since the start of the epidemic in the 1980s. He had recently resigned from his post at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but continues to treat patients at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.

Over the past year, the Trump administration has made life harder for people with HIV, and for those at risk of infection. President Donald Trump’s executive orders prompted the CDC to remove and censor HIV data. Then the Trump administration cut funds to provide lifesaving HIV care abroad, withheld money to prevent and treat HIV in the United States, and gutted HIV groups at the CDC.

Here are a few excerpts of my conversation with Weiser, edited for clarity. A longer version of our talk is here.

How did Trump’s order to remove gender identity impact your research?

Using survey data, we found that people with HIV who misused opioids were more likely to engage in behaviors that could pass on HIV to another person. And we found that very few people who misused opioids were receiving treatments for substance misuse. This information could have been useful to change clinical practice and boost funding to treat people.

We were getting ready to publish this study, but when I put the paper through CDC’s clearance process, I was told to remove data about the prevalence of opioid misuse among transgender people.

I thought carefully about that, and I decided not to do that, because it’s bad science to suppress data for ideologic reasons and because erasing people from the story harms actual people. I thought about my transgender patients and how I would face them, and what I would say to them while I’m sitting with them in the exam room, knowing that I had erased their existence from CDC.

I withdrew the paper.

Why does removing data harm people?

Purging data about transgender people has the effect of erasing them from the real world. This group of people is heavily affected by HIV, and this type of information informs improvements in treatment.

My transgender patients are trying to get by, day by day. They’re trying to survive. I think it’s important to realize that somebody who is transgender needs to feel comfortable in their own body to be healthy — and denying them recognition compounds their challenges.

After the executive order came down, one of my patients said she felt even more afraid of being in public and not passing, and so she was considering having additional surgical treatment to feel safer. Her concern was not about politics. It was about survival.

Why did the CDC follow Trump’s order?

I think the hope was that by complying with the directive, other work at the CDC would be spared. And unfortunately, that hasn’t proved to be the case.

One of my concerns while there was that if it’s OK to comply with a directive to remove information about gender, what if the next demand is that we don’t report about people who emigrated from other countries, or on people who are experiencing homelessness? What if there’s a directive to suppress data about a particular racial or ethnic group that’s unpopular? How far would we go?

Looking for your next read? Check out these other great newsletters.