WASHINGTON (TNS) — With Robert F. Kennedy’s Make Children Healthy Again report under attack for questionable science, imaginary research and other “formatting errors,” as the White House calls them, Democrats are worrying about a politicized public health system selling snake oil to the American public.

You don’t have to look far back in time for examples of the government public health system and the private sector experts who influence it and spearhead its research efforts selling snake oil. The coronavirus pandemic was rife with them.

There was the time public health officials simply made up the claim that staying 6 feet apart would help stop the spread of COVID-19. And the time top officials and scientists conspired to falsely “debunk” concerns that the coronavirus was released from a Chinese lab. And then there were times when public health advice was politicized, like when public health officials said gathering in groups was unsafe, except if it was to protest the death of George Floyd.

They’re not just about COVID, either. Remember the great kerfuffle over Flint, Michigan’s lead problem? The people who were telling you that Black kids were poisoned forgot to tell you that there own data showed blood lead levels of lead in “poisoned” kids were much lower than just a decade earlier when nobody was talking about poisoned kids.

This weekend, you’ll be treated to another misinformation campaign that comes with the imprimatur of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

It’s time for the annual “Gun Violence Awareness Week.” This weekend, buildings all over the country will light up orange in solidarity with those who have lost their lives in what has become a daily bloodbath we spend most of the year ignoring.

Among the claims you’ll be hearing is one I received from a local Kansas City backer of Moms Demand Action, a gun control group. “Gun deaths are the number one cause of deaths of American children and adolescents,” her email said.

Others say the facts are even more stark. California Gov. Gavin Newsom took out ads on social media saying, “Guns are the number one killer of kids.” In a speech to mayors, Vice President Kamala Harris said, “Gun violence is the leading cause of death of the children of America — leading cause of death — not car accidents, not some form of cancer — gun violence.”

FACTS TRIGGER TRUTH The facts tell a different story. Guns are not the number one killer of children at any age between 0 and 12. They never have been. Cars are the biggest killer. Who says? The CDC database called WONDER that tracks the cause of death in most U.S. deaths indexed by race, sex and age among other characteristics. For a number of kids’ years of life, drowning or falls are a greater threat than guns.

I asked the activist who sent that claim to me why she was spreading such a lie. She didn’t respond, but the national press person for Everytown for Gun Safety did reply, citing the CDC and the National Institute of Health as her sources. She sent links.

And she’s right. Here’s what the CDC says: “Taking into account all types of firearm injuries, including homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries, firearm injuries were the leading cause of death among children and teens ages 1 to 19 in 2020 and 2021.”

What they mean is if you lump all the dead children and teens in one pile and count how they died, for the whole gruesome pile, the No. 1 killer was guns. But that is only because guns kill so many teens — a large number of them 18- and 19-year-old adult teens.

That has nothing to do with children’s deaths. Elsewhere on its website, the CDC admits this difference, giving the cause of death for different groups of children as “accidents.”

Why would the CDC do something so misleading? Well, it goes back many decades in which reporting what the leading killer of children and teens was made perfect sense. The killer was the same for them all — accidents, mostly car accidents. So, naturally, they reported the number all together.

When guns overtook car accidents during the Biden administration, they just kept doing the same thing they had always done. Gun control groups loved it because that let them make the claim that children were dying left and right from guns. That scared concerned parents into backing their agenda and coughing up donations. The Biden administration CDC didn’t seem to mind.

But there’s more to this story that is misleading. Remember guns are the No. 1 killer of teens, but are guns a threat to your kids? Probably not.

WHICH TEENS?

The CDC’s WONDER(ful) database reveals that:

• Guns are not the No. 1 killer of female teens.

• Guns are not the No. 1 killer of white teens.

• Guns are not the No. 1 killer of Hispanic teens.

• Guns are not the No. 1 killer of Asian teens.

• Guns are not the No. 1 killer of Native American teens.

• The only group for whom this claim is true is Black teens, which is statistically troubling in itself.

It isn’t like these facts are a shock. I found many of them in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But they do reveal the politicization of our public health experts.

When I asked the author of the article, Dr. Elizabeth Wolf, about the gun control groups’ claim and the fact that it wasn’t actually true that children, female teens, white teens, Hispanic teens, Asian teens and Native American teens were so threatened by guns, she replied that the claim is perfectly accurate and then stopped responding to my emails.

That’s nuts. So if there is an annual bloodbath of gun violence in the United States, why does the slicing and dicing of dry statistics matter?

If your goal is to raise campaign donations and build a national political movement to restrict gun rights, it doesn’t matter. Scaring parents whose kids are not at much risk by fudging the issue works great.

If your goal is to get Congress to fork over millions in research grants on the problem of gun violence, it works great to make Congress think the bullets are flying everywhere and that the blood is flowing on rural, suburban and urban congressional district streets alike.

But if your goal is to actually solve the problem, well, then it really does matter just who is dying and why. Only when we face the answer to that question can we focus resources where the problem is and come up with ways to do something about it.

It would be nice if the CDC made that a priority.

(David Mastio is a national opinion columnist for McClatchy newspapers and the Kansas City Star.)

Dave Mastio