Actually, a searchable history of no longer valid statements together with an explanation what invalidated them (plus links to the relevant articles) would go a long way towards teaching people how science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.