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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

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."

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Actually, a searchable history of no longer valid statements together with an explanation what invalidated them (plus links to the relevant articles) would go a long way towards teaching people how science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

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.

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?

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.

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