Quick: name a single national institution that still has credibility

Teachers? Our domestic and foreign intelligence services? Our military? Democrats and their house organ propagandists, the media, both traditional and social? No, no, no, and no.

But possibly the institution whose perfidy and incompetence has been the most thoroughly discredited (well, excepting the media) is the public health service: the NIH, and the CDC. Here’s the head of the CDC, for instance, misstating the results of scientific studies in order to keep its mask mandate for children in force.

From Yahoo News: WASHINGTON — Young children should continue to wear face masks, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said in congressional testimony on Wednesday, citing studies she says demonstrate that grade-school-age children can contract and spread the coronavirus.

“There’s still transmissions associated with young children,” Walensky said. “They have been vectors of transmission for older people.” (People who act as vectors spread a disease without necessarily becoming sick.)

A number of scientists point to research, however, that contradicts Walensky’s assertions. “What Rochelle Walensky said this morning is incorrect,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Yahoo News. “Children are not vectors.”

Just as Walensky was testifying on Capitol Hill before the House Appropriations Committee (she was there to explain her agency’s proposed budget, but faced many pandemic-related questions), Gandhi co-wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that described the risk of a child contracting the coronavirus from an infected person as .00007 percent. Outdoors, Gandhi and her co-authors found, the risk was a thousand times less than that, which is to say effectively nonexistent.

“We have sacrificed children on the altar of our fear,” Dr. Gandhi told Yahoo News. She described sending the article she’d co-written to the parents of her children’s friends, only to receive no response. The implication, Dr. Gandhi figured, was that those parents wanted their kids — and hers — to stay masked.

She said while the risk of the coronavirus to children has been exaggerated, their resilience in the face of Zoom school and other pandemic-related depredations has been overstated.

The entire article is well worth reading. In the meantime, there’s this observation by Instapundit’s Ed Driscoll:

The above Yahoo article was written by Alexander Nazaryan. When the head of the CDC has lost this guy… it might be time to change the plot.