The White House just unveiled a brand-new Web site — COVID.gov — to help people “find COVID guidance.” Problem is, the feds’ atrocious advice all through the pandemic makes Uncle Sam the last place to go for guidance. 

Look at the latest big news from the CDC: its move to a “community levels” metric to govern indoor-masking rules. That shift — correct but long, long overdue — was prompted not by any change in the science around COVID but by the fact that mask mandates had become a politically disastrous issue for Democrats. 

And the agency still hasn’t updated its absurd guidance that kids in pre-K, literally the lowest-risk group for COVID on the planet, should have to mask “regardless of vaccination status.”

Speaking of schools, consider the dismal CDC record on closures. Even after months of data showed that 1) COVID was never a real risk to school-age kids unless they have serious comorbidities and 2) schools are not major vectors of transmission, the agency still slow-walked its re-opening guidance, largely at the behest of teachers unions (another Dem powerhouse). New reporting even reveals that the United Federation of Teachers actually had “line-by-line” influence on the language of the guidance itself.

The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, mandated a disastrous “pause” on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. After the miraculous arrival on the US market of not one but three COVID vaccines in an unprecedented amount of time, the FDA stepped on the J&J jab over concerns around an extremely rare side effect — in just six cases out of 7 million doses administered. 

Vaccine uptake had been steadily climbing before the pause; after, it crashed. 

Heck, even Supreme Court justices managed to get the basic facts of COVID wrong. Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that “over 100,000 children” were hospitalized with COVID during the Omicron surge. (About 7,900 under-18’s in total have been hospitalized for COVID since March 2020.) 

When it comes to COVID rules — and the science behind them — the federal government has displayed a mixture of brute incompetence and political opportunism that has hurt millions in ways that may prove irreparable. 

Anyone who takes suggestions from COVID.gov does so at his own peril.