Medical Review Process

How health content across the Virus Questions network is kept accurate and current.

Summary: Every clinical page is reviewed monthly against live CDC and WHO guidance. Pages are also updated immediately when major guidance changes occur. Only direct contradictions with primary sources trigger corrections — not inference or speculation.

Why health content must be reviewed regularly

Public health guidance changes. Vaccines are updated. New variants emerge. Outbreak status shifts. Treatment protocols evolve as clinical data accumulates. A page that was accurate at publication may be out of date within months — or weeks during an active emergency.

The Virus Questions network addresses this with a scheduled monthly review and a set of manual triggers for immediate updates when significant guidance changes occur.

Monthly automated review

On the 1st of each month, every clinical page across the network is reviewed. The process:

  1. The primary source pages referenced on each site page are fetched from CDC, WHO, and FDA.
  2. The live source text is compared against the current page content.
  3. Any factual claim on the page that is directly contradicted by the current source text is identified for correction.
  4. Corrections are made to the specific claims, not wholesale rewrites.
  5. The "Last reviewed" date on the page and the lastReviewed field in the page's MedicalWebPage JSON-LD schema are updated to reflect the review date.

What is not changed in the automated review: Additions, style rewrites, inferences, or changes based on new studies not yet reflected in CDC/WHO guidance. This conservative scope prevents unvalidated updates during rapidly evolving outbreak situations where the primary sources themselves may be in flux.

Manual update triggers

In addition to the monthly cycle, pages are reviewed and updated immediately when:

  • The WHO declares or revokes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC)
  • The FDA grants, revokes, or modifies a vaccine or treatment authorization or approval
  • The CDC issues a new or updated travel advisory for an affected region
  • A new variant is classified as a Variant of Concern (VOC) by the WHO or CDC
  • Significant new peer-reviewed evidence directly contradicts a currently stated claim
  • A reader submits a factual correction supported by primary-source evidence

Medical reviewer

All content is currently authored and reviewed by Andy Wilcox, founder of the network. Andy is not a physician. Content is grounded in primary-source research from CDC, WHO, FDA, and peer-reviewed literature.

[PLACEHOLDER: Named medical reviewer — a licensed MD, DO, or PhD in infectious disease, epidemiology, or a directly related field. Once a named reviewer joins the network, their name, credentials, institution/affiliation, and ORCID (if applicable) should appear here and on each site's editorial standards page. The reviewedBy field in each page's MedicalWebPage JSON-LD schema should be updated from Organization: CDC to the named reviewer's Person schema.]

Corrections

Errors identified outside the review cycle — by readers, by automated monitoring, or by the author — are corrected promptly. See the Corrections Policy for how corrections are handled and how to submit one.

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