MSM and academia has the right to be honest but apparently they don't have the ability.

From Was COVID a top cause of death for children? by Mary Pat Campbell.  The subheading is Specifically, in the period August 1, 2021 - July 31, 2022

She is outraged at public health researchers who play numbers games to get the answers they want rather than investigate the data to find out what it is saying.  In this instance, a paper which generated the headline "Covid-19 is a leading cause of death for children in the US, despite relatively low mortality rate."

Campbell points out that they commit two data sins - 1) they strategically select the time frame most conducive to the conclusion they wish to draw even though it is unrepresentative, and 2) they play fast and loose with definitions.  

Campbel points out that infants and children are distinct categories with completely different data profiles.  While very low in absolute terms, the first year of life, i.e. infants, have an all causes death rate 10-20 times any other year before young adulthood.  

Similarly, the further you move into adulthood, the higher is your death rate (while still low).  So if you are a researcher who wants to maximize the impression of elevated levels of childhood death, you want to include both infants and young adults.  Not because they are representative of children but because they juice the numbers.

So now you can see why young adults and infants were included. They could have gotten the ranking they wanted with COVID with just 1-17-year-olds (that is, children), but they would not have gotten the total number of deaths up to something close to 800.

Instead of 829 COVID deaths, which is what I got for ages 0-19 for August 2021 - July 2022, if I had restricted it to ages 1-17 years, which are the ages I look at when I look at child mortality, I would have seen: 476 COVID deaths.

That’s quite a different number.

The age where COVID constituted the highest percentage of deaths for that period was age 9, which is where one finds the lowest mortality rate in general. It was 6% of the deaths. For the other ages, it was about 3% of deaths.

So, it is interesting that at the worst of the pandemic, even for the group where COVID deaths were the highest percentage of deaths, it was only 6% of the deaths. Accidents were still the highest-ranked cause of death in that age group.

[snip]

Oh, and to answer the title: yes, it was a top ten cause of death for children, where children were defined as age 1-17 years old, for the period Aug 1, 2021 - July 31, 2022, using rankable causes of death for underlying cause of death as defined by the CDC.

In fact, it ranked #6 instead of #8, but only 476 deaths, about the same number as heart disease, which was 455 for the same period.

While Covid is Number 6 on the ranking, it is only roughly 10% of the number one killer, Accidents.  

Between mainstream media, academia and vested interests, it feels like deception is endemic.  As Justice Roberts might put it, "The best way to rebuild trust is to stop deceiving."  

Alternatively, as Ron White says:

I had the right to remain silent... but I didn't have the ability. 

MSM and academia has the right to be honest but apparently they don't have the ability.