CDC orders withdrawal or scrubbing of scientific manuscripts at journals to remove "forbidden terms"

CDC directed its scientists to pause, withdraw, or edit manuscripts under consideration or in press at any scientific journal to strip a specified term list: "Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female." The order reached papers co-authored with outside researchers (CDC authors were to remove their names if terms remained) and affected roughly 90 papers in the pipeline per contemporaneous reporting. This is the clearest instance of the terminology mandate reaching peer-reviewed science rather than web content. (For 2025 DOJ letters pressuring medical journals, see section 3.)