CDC Funding Selections Based mostly on Politics, Not Science

By John R. Lott Jr. for RealClearInvestigations

For the second year in a row, the Centers for Disease Control was found to be ignoring science and letting liberal interest groups make policy.

In 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association tracked children’s COVID-19 statistics, and the data showed no relationship between mandatory mask wearing and rates of children contracting the disease.

Confronting this evidence — and other data that reveal masks harm Child Development, CDC supported Masked pupils after pressure from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union.

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Now news is that the CDC is once again allowing partisan politics to influence its policies. this time, Gun Control Activists Get CDC To Remove Study From It its website. However, the CDC is trusted to impartially allocate millions of dollars to public health research on guns: from 2020 arrive 2022, The CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) each spend about $50 million on such research.

Until May of this year, the CDC cited the 2013 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reports that the annual number of defensive firearms used ranges from approximately 64,000 to 3 million. The CDC website lists an upper figure of 2.5 million. But now, the CDC has removed all those numbers from its website, and even removed the link to the NAS report.

Gun control advocates connected with the CDC after being introduced by the White House and Senator Dick Durbin, D-Illinois. They held a private meeting and multiple email exchanges in which they lobbied hard for the CDC to delete the information.

“[T]2.5 million people need to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” Mark Bryant, who manages Gun Violence Archives (GVA), wrote Report to CDC officials after the meeting. “It’s highly misleading, taken out of context, and I truly believe it has zero value – even as an outlier in honest DGU [Defensive Gun Use] discuss. ’ His comment on the 2.5 million figure “is often used to prevent [gun control] legislation. “

The Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey estimates that between 64,000 and 120,000 firearms are used for defense each year. This is the low end of all other social science on the subject. Some 20 such surveys have been carried out. Three of them show about 800,000 defensive firearm uses per year.

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All other estimates are over 1 million, with one as high as 3.5 million. The average estimate is around 2 million. william english of George Town the University Just last year, a survey of 16,708 gun owners was conducted and an estimated 1.67 million firearms are used each year.

The low figures for the National Crime Victimization Survey are due to its choice of screening questions. It starts by asking a person if they have been the victim of a crime. Only respondents who answered “yes” were asked if they ever used a firearm for defense. However, people who successfully wield a gun often do not see themselves as victims.

Devin Hughes, who heads another gun control organization, GVPedia, argued in an email to the CDC on July 6, 2021 that it should use the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) estimates of defensive gun use. Hughes claims the GVA is “the most widely accepted compendium of gun violence data”. Between January and mid-December of this year, the GVA claims there were only 1,112 defensive firearm uses in the United States.

last year, RealClearInvestigations inspection The Gun Violence Archive’s data from Jan. 1 to Aug. 10 found 774 defensive gun uses. Ninety-five percent of these self-defense cases come from initial news coverage. I checked these cases against other lists compiled by the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Crime Prevention Research and found that the GVA had missed another 30 cases. But that’s not the important question.

What makes defensive gun use newsworthy doesn’t accurately reflect the real world. According to GVA statistics, 43% of GVA’s gun violence cases involved death, 42% involved injuries, and 10% were defensive shootings that did not hit anyone.

Fewer than 4 percent of cases involved a failure to fire a gun, and more than half of those cases involved the offender being held at gunpoint before police arrived. But as gun control experts know, such cases account for only a small fraction of guns used in self-defense.

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First, relying on the news media to collect crime data is not an accurate method.criminologists know Less than a quarter of violent crimes are reported to police. The news media doesn’t even report most violent crimes reported to the police.Second, and more importantly, about 95% of defensive firearm use involves brandishing a weapon.

Bryant defended his reliance on media coverage and dismissed the argument that the media disproportionately covered the most violent cases. “I don’t think this is a newsworthy issue…too much media really likes the feel-good story of a homeowner fighting an intruder,” Bryant wrote to me last year. “It would be even better if it was done by a granny. They’re not just going for the ‘if it bleeds…’ newsworthiness.”

This is a naive view of how newsrooms work. Suppose an editor is shown two stories, one with a body on the ground and one with no one hurt because the potential victim brandished a gun and the criminal got away. Later in the story, you can’t even be sure what crime will be committed. Which story would you run in your hometown newspaper?

But even then, that’s not really the point. When law-abiding citizens brandish legal guns to scare off would-be criminals, journalists often don’t consider their newsworthiness, simply because such cases are reported neither to the police nor to the media. That’s why rigorous social science research is needed — and it’s the kind of research that the CDC scrutinizes for special interest.

Unfortunately, Democrats in Congress have earmarked $100 million for research Public health researchers are far to the left on gun control than criminologists or economists.

The CDC has always based its decisions on politics, not science. It showed that it could not separate political views from decisions about funding recipients. But, as researchers are well aware, the CDC is not unique. Governments cannot exclude politics from funding decisions.

Syndicated under license from RealClearWire.

John R. Lott Jr. is really clear investigation, focusing on voting and gun rights.His articles have appeared in such wall street journal, New York Times, los angeles times, new york post, usa todaywith chicago tribune. Lott is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford University, UCLA, Wharton School of Business, and Rice University.

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