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."
It wouldn't have to clutter the most recent info page, but just be provided as a link somewhere.
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.
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
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.
We really love to overcomplicated things as an industry... (I personally am quite guilty of the same)
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.
There is no memory-holing going on. Just tweaks to what they think is a high priority to communicate via that page.
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...
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.
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.