CDC blamed for allowing liberal groups – instead of real science – to guide funding
By jdheyes // 2022-12-27
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Yet another federal agency has become completely politicized, thanks to the left-wing sycophants who are running Joe Biden's regime – and they don't mind using our tax dollars to do it. While we've seen the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation transform into agencies that function as gatekeepers for the Deep State, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also been taken over by leftist ideologues, as revealed in a new analysis. According to Real Clear Politics, for the second budget year in a row, the "health" and research agency is putting money into areas based on left-wing priorities, not on real science, with policies being set by far-left patronage organizations: In 2021, the American Pediatric Academy and the Children’s Hospital Association tracked COVID-19 statistics in children and the data show no relationship between mask mandates and the rate at which children caught the disease. In the face of this evidence – and other data showing that masks harm children’s development, the CDC supported masking students after being pressured by the National Education Association (the nation’s largest teachers’ union). Now comes word that CDC is again allowing partisan politics to influence its policies. This time, gun control activists got the CDC to remove research from its website. Yet, the CDC is trusted to impartially dole out millions of dollars for public health research on firearms: From 2020 to 2022, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) each spent about $50 million on such research. The analysis, from noted gun crime and gun use researcher John Lott Jr., noted that until May of this year, the CDC made reference to a 2013 National Academies of Sciences (NAS) report that showed the number of self-defense gun uses annually fell into a wide range of between 64,000 and 3 million. Indeed, the CDC actually listed defensive uses in the upper figure, at around 2.5 million per year. However, the agency has since removed all of those numbers from its website along with the link to the NAS report. Getting their queue from the Biden regime and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a careerist politician if ever there was one, gun control advocates made contact with the CDC. In a series of meetings and emails, they lobbied for the agency to remove the information from its website. And why? Because if Americans knew how often guns were used to defend lives, then it would be a lot harder to pass more gun control legislation. "That 2.5 million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again," Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), wrote to CDC officials after their meeting. "It is highly misleading, is used out of context and I honestly believe it has zero value – even as an outlier point in honest DGU [Defensive Gun Use] discussions." He was upset that the 2.5 million number "has been used so often to stop [gun control] legislation." It's not 'misleading' and it is not 'out of context'; it is an accurate portrayal of defense gun uses and the American public has a right to know that. Even the "DOJ's National Crime Victimization Survey estimates that there are between 64,000 and 120,000 instances each year in which a firearm is used defensively," Lott wrote. "This is on the low end of all the other social science on this subject. Some 20 such surveys have been conducted. Three of them show about 800,000 defensive gun uses a year. All the other estimates are over one million, with one as high as 3.5 million," he added. Lott goes on to say that this overt influence by gun controllers is having an affect on CDC policymaking. "Unfortunately, Democrats in Congress have earmarked the $100 million in research funding for public health researchers who are far to the left on gun control compared to criminologists or economists," he wrote. "The CDC keeps making decisions based on politics, not science. It has shown that it is not able to divorce political views from decisions about who to fund. But, as researchers know all too well, the CDC isn’t unique. The government just can’t keep politics out of funding decisions." Sources include: RealClearPolitics.com TheReload.com
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