For years, we’ve written story after story about how the government has earned every bit of distrust it faces from the public. During a pandemic, it’s vitally important that we be able to trust the information and guidelines being given by the government. Yet here we are, with a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that can’t be trusted to not politicize information or outright misinform the public.

Should anyone be wearing masks outside, and in what circumstances? We’ve discussed that question more than once. Now, the CDC has been busted giving bogus statistics about it to back up its guidelines.

“When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines last month for mask wearing, it announced that ‘less than 10 percent’ of Covid-19 transmission was occurring outdoors,” reports the New York Times of all places. “But the number is almost certainly misleading.” How misleading? “In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent.”

In other words, the CDC was off by an order of magnitude — not even in the outdoor ballpark for how risky being outside really is for contracting COVID. And yet the CDC is still recommending that children wear masks at summer camps virtually “at all times.” It’s still insisting that vaccinated people wear masks outdoors in “large public venues” and that unvaccinated people wear them pretty much all the time.

Misleading information can have far-reaching effects, including the fact that those of us who refuse to comply with this tyrannical stupidity are routinely scorned and harassed for it.

Meanwhile, speaking of the New York Times, remember its false story about Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick? The misinformation that he died due to being hit in the head by a fire extinguisher during the Capitol riot took hold so deeply that it was used in other Leftmedia “fact-checks” to discredit true statements. Only months later is the record being corrected for anyone still paying attention.

Why do we bring this up? Because when lies and misinformation take root, they are extremely hard to set right. Thus, when the CDC issues guidelines about outdoor masking, many organizations religiously adhere to that new dogma, regardless of its accuracy, later corrections, or reports debunking the bad information. When the CDC declared that social distancing meant six feet, schools around the country closed. By the time the CDC corrected that information and decided that the World Health Organization’s standard of three feet was actually sufficient all along, it was too late. Millions of Americans — especially our children — suffered unnecessarily because of wrong information.

A recent report on lockdowns themselves is likewise damning for the deadly effects of bad policy based on faulty science. And the hits keep on coming.

Yet here’s Dr. Anthony Fauci just this past weekend preparing us for another year of drummed up doom and gloom: “I hope that next Mother’s Day we’re going to see a dramatic difference than what we’re seeing right now. I believe that we will be about as close to back to normal as we can. And there’s some conditions to that.” Donald Trump should have fired Fauci a year ago.

Republican Senator Susan Collins has seen enough. “So here we have unnecessary barriers to reopening schools, exaggerating the risks of outdoor transmission, and unworkable restrictions on summer camps,” Collins told CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in a hearing Tuesday. “Why does this matter? It matters because it undermines public confidence in your recommendations, in the recommendations that do make sense, in the recommendations that Americans should be following.”

Her Louisiana colleague, Senator Bill Cassidy, agreed. “The American people are incredibly frustrated,” he said. “They’re beginning to disregard what you say that’s true, because … so much of what you say is patently not true.”

Collins gave the bottom line: “I used to have the utmost respect for the guidance from the CDC. I always considered the CDC to be the Gold Standard. I don’t anymore.”

Fewer and fewer Americans do, and that’s a real problem, self-inflicted by the CDC itself.