About Virus Questions

An independent network of virus-specific public health information sites — built on primary sources, not summaries of summaries.

Why this network exists

When a new virus makes headlines — an Ebola outbreak, a novel COVID variant, a cluster of hantavirus cases — millions of people search for answers. What they typically find is a mix of news articles optimized for engagement, technical CDC guidance written for clinicians, and social media speculation. None of those serve the person who simply needs a clear, accurate, actionable answer.

The Virus Questions network exists to fill that gap: authoritative information made accessible to people who are not epidemiologists, sourced directly from CDC, WHO, NIH, and peer-reviewed literature.

The network

The Virus Questions network currently operates four sites:

This site — VirusQuestions.com — is the hub: it explains what the network is, establishes the shared editorial standards, and routes visitors to the right spoke.

What holds the standards in place

Editorial standards that live only in a policy document drift. These are enforced mechanically instead, in the build that publishes every page:

  • Health claims must carry a citation; an uncited statistic in prose is flagged before it ships.
  • The comparison dataset's schema rejects an unsourced figure outright, and refuses a derived figure whose inputs disagree on geography.
  • No page may name a clinician as reviewer, because none reviews them — the author is not a physician and the network does not imply otherwise.
  • Every clinical page is checked monthly against live CDC and WHO guidance.

The corrections log is the evidence that this catches things: it records errors that reached live pages, including one correction that was itself wrong.

What we do not do

  • We do not publish speculation, unverified claims, or social media-sourced information
  • We do not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment recommendations
  • We do not suggest unproven or unapproved treatments
  • We do not overstate risk to audiences with low exposure probability
  • We do not understate risk to healthcare workers, travelers, or those with genuine exposure
  • We do not fill knowledge gaps with inference — uncertainty is stated explicitly

Authorship

The Virus Questions network is written and maintained by Andy Wilcox, the founder of the network. Andy is not a physician. His work is the product of disciplined primary-source research drawing on 30+ years as a consultant, operating executive, and investor — including early work at Ernst & Young with Fortune 500 pharmaceutical and healthcare clients.

Every factual claim across the network is sourced to and linked from a primary authority: CDC, WHO, FDA, NIH, ECDC, or peer-reviewed literature. This is non-negotiable.

Content review

Every clinical page across the network is reviewed monthly against live CDC and WHO source content. When a specific claim is directly contradicted by current authority guidance, it is corrected. Pages are also updated immediately when major guidance changes occur — such as a new WHO PHEIC declaration, an FDA emergency authorization, or a significant update to CDC travel guidance.

Full details are in the How We Research & Review page.

Disclosures

As of August 2026, no site in this network displays advertising, and no affiliate link appears on any indexable page. Both were switched off network-wide behind a single flag and have stayed off. This page previously said the opposite; it was wrong, and the correction is logged.

The spoke sites remain enrolled in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and the network remains registered with Google AdSense, so both could be re-enabled. If and when that happens, this section will say so on the day it changes. Where affiliate links do return, product selections are editorial rather than commission-driven, and advertisements are served automatically and are not editorial endorsements.

There is no sponsored content anywhere in the network, and no third party has ever paid for placement, review, or mention on any page.

Contact

Factual corrections, questions, or media inquiries: contact page. Corrections supported by primary-source evidence are reviewed promptly and, if warranted, published with attribution.