By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
Special to Liberty Park Press
The recently released Make Our Children Healthy Again report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services should be required reading for parents of all types.
Contained within its 20 pages are scores of topics that are designed to help parents improve their children’s health.
The report examines an increase of childhood chronic diseases. It explains how processed foods can harm kids, as well as what’s behind what it calls the “American Children’s Food Crisis.”
The authors scrutinize toxic chemicals in the environment, as well as why children are “uniquely vulnerable to environmental chemicals.”
The work even examines the decline of physical activity that’s growing among today’s youth, as well as “overmedicalization” and the problems it creates.
Unfortunately, rather than praising Kennedy, his team and their months of hard work, the anti-gunners and their media accomplices were incredibly displeased over one issue: Nowhere within its 20 pages does Kennedy’s report include the word “gun.”
“Kennedy commission child health report ignores gun violence, the leading cause of child death,” screamed a story published Tuesday by Los Angeles Times staff writer Corinne Purtill.
“Absent from the document was any mention of guns, the leading cause of death for people under the age of 18,” Purtill wrote. “Firearms have been the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 17 every year since 2022.”
As “proof,” Purtill links to a 2022 study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Suffice it to say this report, like most of the anti-gun publications the Center has published, was debunked years ago.
As you can imagine, the young reporter then turns to a stable of so-called experts to help support her faulty theory.
Purtill turned first to Bruce Mirkin, who according to his LinkedIn page, works parttime as a “Writer, Media Relations Consultant, Maker of Trouble.”
“If you’re putting out a report that’s supposed to address how to help our children stay healthier, and you’re not even mentioning the No. 1 cause of childhood deaths, you ought to be embarrassed,” Purtill quoted Mirkin as saying.
She never mentioned that Mirkin’s nonprofit has only existed for 10 months, or that his degree from Pomona College obtained in 1978 was a BA in theater. He has no science background whatsoever, which forced Mirkin to admit his error on LinkedIn.
“I usually avoid being spokesperson for Defend Public Health, preferring to defer to our science and medical folks, but today I had to step into the breach to give a comment for this excellent L.A. Times article,” Mirkin was forced to post.
Purtill then turned to an actual doctor for his comments about the new report, Dr. Adam Ratner, whom she described as a “New York pediatric infectious-disease specialist.”
“By ignoring guns as a leading cause of childhood mortality and focusing instead on stigmatizing medication use, Kennedy’s strategy will endanger children while doing nothing to address the root of the problem,” Dr. Ratner told the reporter.
But like Mirkin, Dr. Ratner wasn’t a true neutral expert. In fact, Ratner had strongly opposed Kennedy becoming HHS secretary since he was sworn in.
In an interview on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, which held in February, Ratner made his opinion of Secretary Kennedy very well known.
“To start, I want to be clear that my comments about RFK and about everything that we talk about today are my personal opinion and aren’t the – meant to represent the institutions I work for or anyone else I’m affiliated with. The – it’s very disconcerting. It’s very disturbing that someone who has spent so much of his career trying to undermine confidence in vaccines, trying to tear down the infrastructure that approves and recommends vaccines, has the potential to be in a position of power over the infrastructure that has those goals,” Ratner said.
The Commission members who produced the Make Our Children Healthy Again report, which Kennedy chaired, are a heady bunch.
They include the secretaries of Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Veterans Affairs, the EPA, the OMB and many more. It’s truly a formidable group.
To be clear, the authors never mentioned auto accident deaths or swimming pool drownings either. It’s a medical report.
If a journalist wishes to show that the work the Commission produced is somehow a negative, perhaps she should have used voices more potent than an aging thespian and a physician with an axe to grind.
The Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project wouldn’t be possible without you. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to support pro-gun stories like this.
