One thing you might have missed in the deluge of Trump-related news is that he has taken an axe to the US government’s stockpiles of health data. The new administration has made massive changes to federal websites, including pillars of the US’s health system like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research – among many other topics – have been removed, according to The New York Times. The BBC reported that references to LGBTQ+ health and information on certain vaccines had been scrubbed from federal websites.

This affects millions of people around the world, especially the most vulnerable. Without the data and details around life-and-death issues there is no transparency. Which means there is no accountability and no means of ensuring the right standards are upheld in the world of health provision.

At TBIJ, it makes the reporting our readers have so generously supported harder to do. We have worked tirelessly to expose abuses around how the Covid vaccines were distributed world-wide, how poor people couldn’t get access to oxygen when they most needed it, and how children with cancer were given dodgy drugs.

The reporting by our Global Health team relies on empirical data to expose inequalities around the world and give people the information they need to bring about positive change. 

Sometimes we build our own data sets and run our own testing, but many of the team’s biggest stories have come from CDC figures and other data. Those include: revealing the US companies selling diseased meat; this investigation into Big Tobacco lobbying tactics; and this exposé of a North Carolina tobacco farmer turned politician accused of abusing his workers.

“Our jobs just got a lot harder,” Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer prize winner and the director of the Knight Science Journalism programme at Massachusetts Institute for Technology, told us. “And they also became a lot more necessary, because our government is in information-failure mode at the moment and there are going to be issues – from viral outbreaks to climate threats to environmental exposures – that people need to know.”

In her piece about what this means for everyone, our Deputy Editor Chrissie Giles, an experienced health editor herself, says: “It’s data that helps us separate fact from fiction. When the evidence is concealed, it allows the powerful to evade scrutiny – and leaves the rest of us to suffer.”

Factchecked!

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

Did you know?

Sometimes, all it takes is a critical review on Google or a strongly worded Facebook post to find yourself threatened by lawyers.

Find out more

Many people don’t know libel laws cover not only material published on a news website, but also anything you send to even just one recipient. 

This is part of the wider issue of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), where wealthy individuals use expensive lawyers to silence criticism. Journalists are an obvious target but the average social media user is also becoming increasingly at risk.

Read more here.

MPs push for answers on Abramovich’s taxes

The response to our investigation into Roman Abramovich’s tax dodging is building. 

MPs have been putting pressure on the authorities to take action on our findings that the millions he didn’t pay in VAT on his yacht operations amounted to tax evasion and that he could separately owe HMRC up to £1bn.

In the Commons, the Labour MP Phil Brickell brought up TBIJ’s revelations that VAT had been evaded on the running of Eclipse, one of Abramovich’s megayachts. He said: “This is a complex web of deceit intended to prevent taxes being paid where they are due. It is conducted on an industrial scale and involves an army of immoral corporate service providers, lawyers and accountants only too happy to facilitate such demands.” 

It couldn’t be more damning. Many of the companies involved in Abramovich’s schemes are in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), including those relevant to Eclipse. The BVI and the UK’s other Overseas Territories help kleptocrats, oligarchs and organised criminals hide their cash, by allowing them to build opaque company structures. 

The UK ultimately sits at the heart of the global machine keeping dark money safe for these people and away from the people entitled to it.

Brickell and other MPs used the reporting we did with the BBC and The Guardian to highlight the problem and to demand that the UK take a stronger line on its Overseas Territories. 

It’s a particularly relevant time, as the BVI has introduced some reforms to its corporate transparency regime and they’re not good. The reforms are going to make it virtually impossible for investigative reporters like us to identify who the owners of companies are. 

It’s a typical case of the BVI and co getting the benefits of British protection, but not really playing their part in helping the UK clean up its act. But MPs have written to the BVI premier asking him to think again before the islands bring in this new legislation. 

MPs also asked HMRC whether it had any clue about how much UK tax was being kept out of its reach offshore. The agency’s estimate is about £300m per year, but given what we found out about one billionaire alone, this seems like a gross underestimate. 

Given that Labour campaigned on cleaning up the government and cracking down on tax dodging by the mega-rich, I’d have thought Keir Starmer would be all over this. At the moment, it’s been left to backbench MPs to sound the alarm. Let’s see if that changes.

But it has been really satisfying to see at least some MPs take this so seriously. It’s thanks to one thing that is exceptional about TBIJ, if you ask me. We have impact producers, whose job is to ensure that our most important reporting gets to the right people in a way that’s relevant to them.

MPs have learnt that when TBIJ’s Lucy Nash tells them we’ve done an investigation they should pay attention to, they’d best take a look right away. That’s what happened with Silenced Stories, and now with the Abramovich investigation. Thanks to Lucy’s outstanding work, MPs were quickly able to navigate a really complex issue and rapidly sprung into action.

It’s important to remember that Abramovich denies any wrongdoing. His representatives told us that he got tax advice on everything and acted in accordance with it.

Before I go, I wanted to share a small insight into the work of TBIJ. One question I often get after a big investigation like this one is whether we get pushback from the people we wrote about – whether that’s legal threats against us or our sources. We haven’t heard anything from Abramovich or any of his associates since we published. 

But we did get a pretty odd approach this week. Someone apparently called Amelia Korenchenko tried to connect with members of our Enablers team on LinkedIn, with a profile saying she was the Chief Investigative Editor at TBIJ. I’m pretty sure I know all of my colleagues and Amelia is not one of them. And we don’t have a Chief Investigative Editor, as grandiose as that sounds.

Look at Amelia’s photo closely and it has that odd feel of an AI-generated image. We ran it through some online tools and, yes, it probably was made with AI. 

There are serious online threats out there. This one was more on the “Come on, please” end of the spectrum.