Why guidance needs versions and data needs flags
Briefs here split cleanly in two, and the halves need different handling.
Statistical and surveillance requests are about series: indicator, geography, time period, value and unit, collected on a schedule so each update lands as new rows beside the last. Suppression flags and confidence intervals travel with every value.
Guidance is different. It exists as web content, it changes as advice changes, and the historical versions are not published anywhere convenient. A client tracking how a recommendation evolved needs somebody to have been collecting it, and once collection starts every change becomes a record. That is the piece with real value and it is unrecoverable retrospectively.
The third consideration is suppression and comparability in the surveillance data. Counts are suppressed below thresholds, definitions change between reporting years, and geography boundaries are revised. A dataset that ignores those produces trend lines with methodology breaks presented as real movement.
The fourth is that this is a federal agency's public output, and it is public health guidance rather than clinical advice for an individual - a distinction we state rather than leave implied.