The CDC recently approved Covid vaccines for infants and other children under the age of five. The agency justified this recommendation, in part, by citing flawed data from a pre-print study that dramatically inflated the risk of Covid to kids. Specifically, the study calculated the total number of Covid-related deaths over the past 26 months, and then compared that number against other causes of deaths for children of that age group. This comparison led the researchers to falsely claim that Covid is a “top five cause of death” for children in this age group.

Yet, the comparison was fundamentally flawed, as the other, non-Covid causes reflected deaths that occurred over a 12-month period, whereas the Covid-related deaths reflected a period spanning 26 months. In other words, the study authors overstated the Covid-related deaths by more than double. While the study was flawed in other areas as well, this was the most dramatic and significant error.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Covid data would have instantly known these numbers were wildly inflated. To be clear, the CDC has accurate data on their own website. Anyone, such as a CDC employee or one of its ostensible experts, could have produced accurate information by simply navigating to the CDC website and running the numbers for themselves—a process that could easily be completed in an hour or less.

Instead, the CDC’s official advisory panel of independent experts relied on these bogus numbers when the group made their decision to recommend vaccination for children under the age of five. News outlets later reported the falsehood, and the former U.S. Surgeon General has repeatedly and continuously shared this false data, despite being informed of its falsity. But at least the CDC ultimately published a formal retraction and apology, while alerting us to the fact that the agency had inadvertently relied on false information when making vital public health decisions, right? Sadly, no. That vital oversight and accountability function is instead being performed by a concerned mom named Kelley, who analyzes Covid-related issues in her spare time.

To say that the public health establishment in this country has disgraced itself in its response to Covid is putting it mildly. The CDC receives billions of tax dollars each year and employs over 10,000 people. That it falls to a concerned parent to correct the agency’s errors is remarkable, to say the least. That the CDC made an error of this magnitude on an issue of such paramount importance—making evidence-based medical recommendations for young children and infants—is inexcusable.

As I’ve documented previously elsewhere, the CDC has repeatedly and consistently misled the public about Covid. And they continue to do so. To wit, the CDC now claims that healthy children under the age of five who have recovered from Covid “should” still get the vaccine. The agency possess no data that would support such a recommendation, however.

The sad reality is that, at this point, nothing the so-called experts say about Covid can be trusted without independent verification first. Given most of the corporate press is unwilling to provide such a service, we are very lucky to have volunteers like Kelley of Georgia performing that function for us.

Putting aside the CDC’s catastrophic, almost incomprehensible failures for a moment, this episode has an important lesson that can be applied more broadly—it is utter folly to ever allow government experts to have a monopoly on any area of information, particularly when it comes to things as important as science and public health.

And it’s not merely due to fact that government experts are frequently wrong, sometimes in catastrophically embarrassing ways. Allowing these bureaucracies to dictate what is “Science” or truth ultimately means that your fundamental rights—whether it be your right to bodily autonomy or the right to keep weapons for lawful self-defense purposes—are contingent on the approval of these so-called experts. And as the Covid experience has made clear to all, if that’s the case, you don’t have rights at all, but mere privileges that the government can revoke whenever it wishes.