Background: Accurate public health information is critical for healthcare providers, public health officials, and researchers. Historically, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website was a reputable source. After executive orders in January 2025, many CDC webpages were removed. When pages reappeared, changes were observed, including removal of diversity, equity, and inclusion terminology, raising concerns about broader, undocumented alterations and threatening health justice. Individual pages of the pre-January 20, 2025 CDC website were archived, but difficult to navigate (broken links, not searchable). We sought to replicate the previous CDC website to restore access to valuable information.

Approach: We unpacked an archived web crawl of the primary CDC Web domain to re-build links between pages. The only changes were removing the CDC logo, adding a “report problems” button, and adding a sticky header stating this is not a CDC website. The site has 73,832 web pages, which was 95 GB after decompression and conversion. We also unpacked a compressed file of datasets (~100GB) archived before January 28, 2025. We publicized the site through social media, press releases, professional listservs, and personal networks. We are committed to transparency and share our code publicly (GitHub repositories).

Quantification: In the first week of the website (RestoredCDC), over 176,000 unique visitors came to the site.

Current status: This project is still underway. We plan to create a comparison tool to assess differences between the restored and current CDC sites, which will allow investigators to gain insight into the intent and extent of the changes.