Annals of Internal Medicine study documents 38 CDC databases stopped updating by October 2025

A peer-reviewed study by Jeremy Jacobs at Vanderbilt University, published January 27, 2026 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, provided the first systematic audit of CDC public health database update cadences. The study examined all 82 CDC databases updated at least monthly and found that 38 had stopped receiving new data by October 2025. Thirty-four of the 38 showed no new entries for six months or more. Eighty-seven percent of the paused databases tracked vaccination data, while zero of the 44 databases that continued updating were vaccination-related. The pauses concentrated in March and April 2025, weeks after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as HHS Secretary on February 13. No public notices appeared on CDC website pages for any of the 38 systems. HHS responded that the pauses were "routine data quality and system management decisions, not political direction" but provided no technical explanation, named no responsible official, and offered no resumption timeline. Jacobs and co-authors at Boston University Law wrote that the pattern was "hard to explain by any process other than a deliberate decision to stop updating vaccination surveillance."