Please don't post flamebait like this on divisive topics.

Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules? Note these ones:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

"Eschew flamebait."

The problem isn't that they're finally not hosting that misinformation anymore. It's that they're trying to memoryhole the fact that they ever were, instead of saying something to the effect of "we used to believe that the mRNA and the spike protein would not last long in the body, but now we think they do."

But that has never been the standard for any publication place? And you only want them to do that because you feel that you’ve won an argument and don’t feel you got a price for it. Imagine how cluttered any Wikipedia page on any subject would be if it needed to contain not just an accurate current state understanding of the subject, but also every previous version ever.

Sure it has, reputable news publications as well as scientific journals issue retractions and updates as a matter of course. E.g. NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/30/admin/new-york-times-corr... Additionally, your example of Wikipedia directly works against your argument as one of the core features of Wikipedia is the revision history of every single page. Being able to have an understanding of what it said over time is a feature which counterbalances the nature of it being sourced by pseudononymous writers.

What do you expect? An entire history lesson about everything on the CDC site? Go read the scientific articles if that's what you want. CDC should reflect the current best knowledge without fluff.

Actually, a searchable history of no longer valid statements together with an explanation what invalidated them (plus links to the relevant articles) would go a long way towards teaching people how science really operates and that it isn't a kind of "just trust us and our dictate" authoritarian system.

It wouldn't have to clutter the most recent info page, but just be provided as a link somewhere.

Science has a lot of problems today, agreed, but this is not one of it, but the people's one who do not want to understand science and unfortunately cannot even be helped with that but would still make their point with it..

If a significant (and rising) proportion of the population is starting to distrust you and increasingly anecdotes show that we are certainly not moving toward more acceptance of science in the short term - as a slow, generational effect, yes, this is still happening, but it is more than countered when the optics are such that people can read conspiracy due to authoritarian overreach. Especially one cheered by a suddenly non-cautious, non-skeptical block of people (mostly science journalists) (mis-) representing "The Science".

The reality is we need to be the strongest advocates of scientific thinking and literacy - trust is /the/ critical foundation for all institutions in society, especially ones that want to be able to influence society writ-large.

We, scientists, academics, and yes, the press, have to proactively earn trust.

I agree that it would have value. But it still shouldn't be the responsibility of the CDC. Rather a separate thing should do that.

I mean, why not the responsibility of CDC?

Perhaps lobby your representatives in Congress to dedicate additional funding for the CDC to build that out?

That’s generally not how agency budgeting works.

There should be a page history with a comment describing why changes were made. The latest revision can describe the current best knowledge “without fluff”, and the revision history can show why and how the content changed over time.

The CDC already has a list of when updates were made to all the pages, but AFAICT it doesn’t say what changed or why.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/whats-new-all.html

> What do you expect?

A link to a public git repository of the web site would be a great start. The site should already be in a VCS of some kind, just shove it on github or something where we can all see the history.

I've worked on many websites, and the content of a great percentage (probably a significant majority) is not in a VCS at all.

And this despite that most of that information is static and primarily text with links to media. There is no reason not to store it as markdown and render the final HTML over the top of it whenever the relevant styling envelope changes.

We really love to overcomplicated things as an industry... (I personally am quite guilty of the same)

They are making this change because previous beliefs they had - which partly formed the basis of regulatory approvals followed by forcing this stuff into people against their will - were wrong.

At minimum this means a total failure of the regulatory process. They were victims of misinformation and made approval decisions based on that. Given their obsession with it they'd need to investigate how that happened and put in place new processes to rebuild the trust that is now correctly lacking.

That page still links to https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/where-mrna-vaccines-and-sp...

There is no memory-holing going on. Just tweaks to what they think is a high priority to communicate via that page.

What’s your reason to believe the CDC would “come after” archive.org? It sounds like pure conspiracy-theory fantasy.

The CDC did not cover themselves with glory in this pandemic.

They insisted that they were the only outfit who could conduct covid testing, and shut down all other labs that were doing testing. This was at the very beginning of the outbreak where testing was critical. Then, it took them a long time to produce a test, and the test ended up not working.

And this was after being lazy and just believing the authorities in China about covid instead of doing their own surveillance. Taiwan did a great job of this, but the CDC epically failed.

Remember "2 weeks to flatten the curve"?

And what about the teacher's union using the CDC as a sock puppet?

https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/teachers-union-collaborated-wi...

The details aren't important, as long as we're good patriotic citizens and comply.

"Science" is not a get out of jail free card for making false claims with 100% confidence that then later get inverted, over and over again. Science is a process for the discovery of things that are true and management of uncertainty is a key part of that process.

Our society seems to have massive problems at every level with distinguishing science from pseudo-science. The CDC is perhaps the biggest and best funded source of misinformation on the planet. They have been constantly making claims backed by nonsense-level studies or even no studies whatsoever, simply to get people to obey their policies. Them quietly editing their website with no admission or notification that they were previously wrong is not Science!!, it's the act of a dystopian bureaucracy.

What would actually be needed here is:

1. A written press release notifying the world of the change, instead of it being spotted by people who have learned not to trust them about anything.

2. A really detailed and thorough investigation of how they were so wrong about such a critical fact, and how the trial / regulatory approval process missed it.

3. A recognition that other people, with far fewer resources, were actually stating that the mRNA seemed to be lingering in the body many months ago. And that therefore their constant demands that anyone who disagrees with them be silenced are wrong.

If they are changing the information because of scientific knowledge the CDC should have no trouble whatsoever detailing

1) Why they had the information on their website in the first place 2) Why the information in the past was wrong (in light of new evidence) 3) Why the current information should be taken seriously in light of the aforementioned misinformation.

the concern is that the evidence that lead to the approval of these “vaccines” was as bad as the evidence for humors and leeches.

Can you expand on this comment? It's a bit unclear, at least to me.

It's often used as an antisemitic slur. Given the context I think that is the case here.

Foolish racism from extremist caves of the Internet.