The New York Times was forced to issue multiple, major corrections for an article published on Wednesday that falsely claimed 900,000 children had been hospitalized for COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.
The full correction reads:
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described actions taken by regulators in Sweden and Denmark. They have halted use of the Moderna vaccine in children; they have not begun offering single doses. The article also misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children. It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic. In addition, the article misstated the timing of an F.D.A. meeting on authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children. It is later this month, not next week.
The headline and subhead still mention single-dose vaccines for children, but that only refers to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
And while the Times article discusses how other countries are trying to balance the risks of vaccinating children, it notes that the U.S. is doing things differently. One infectious diseases physician told the outlet that “We’ve had a significant impact on our pediatric population.” This is when the Times originally claimed 900,000 children had been hospitalized during the pandemic. The article now says 63,000 children were hospitalized between August 2020 and October 2021. It also states that 520 children have died due to COVID-19, without noting how small a fraction that is compared to the hundreds of thousands of adults who have died during the pandemic or noting the low likelihood children have of getting COVID.
As New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz noted on Twitter: “The article addresses that other countries are slowing down on vaccinating children 12-17, either stopping it altogether or just giving one dose. The whole piece is about how other countries are weighing the risks and then in the US we’re like nah, let’s just do it.”
The article addresses that other countries are slowing down on vaccinating children 12-17, either stopping it altogether or just giving one dose. The whole piece is about how other countries are weighing the risks and then in the US we're like nah, let's just do it. pic.twitter.com/LqNsfMtjif
This isn’t the first time the author of the Times article, Apoorva Mandavilli, has had numerous editors added to her article.
In August of last year, Mandavilli wrote an article about coronavirus tests that also required multiple sections to be corrected. The correction on that article reads:
An earlier version of this article, using information provided by a laboratory spokesman, misstated the number of positive coronavirus tests in July processed by Wadsworth Center, New York’s state lab. It was 872 tests, not 794. Based on that error, the article also misstated the number of tests that would no longer qualify as positive with a C.T. value of 35 cycles. It is about 43 percent of the tests, not about half of them. Similarly, the article misstated the number of tests that would no longer qualify as positive if cycles were limited to 30. It is about 63 percent of the tests, not about 70 percent.
For more than a decade, Tesla had its Silicon Valley headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Elon Musk announced on Thursday that Tesla is moving its headquarters to Austin, Texas.
“I’m excited to announce we’re moving our headquarters to Austin, Texas,” Musk said during the electric car company’s annual shareholders meeting, garnering applause from the audience.
“Just to be clear though, we will be continuing to expand our activities in California,” the Telsa CEO emphasized. “So this is not a matter of, sort of, Tesla leaving California.”
Musk noted that the exorbitant real estate prices in California were a consideration for the relocation.
“It’s tough for people to afford houses and a lot of people have to come in from far away,” Musk said. “We’re taking it as far as possible but there’s a limit to how big you can scale it in the Bay Area.”
The median home price in Palo Alto is $3.3 million versus $588,000 in Austin, according to Realtor.com.
Dan Ives – an analyst with Wedbush Securities – told the Austin American-Statesman, “This is a major strategic move for Tesla that makes a ton of sense. The tea leaves were there for Tesla to make this move and it’s a huge feather in the cap for Austin.”
Tesla has nearly completed building a massive $1.1 billion “Gigafactory” in east Austin and has already posted job listings for the plant that will manufacture the electric car company’s new Cybertruck model and the Model Y small SUV. The factory is five minutes from the airport and 15 minutes from Austin’s downtown.
Elon Musk has been an outspoken opponent against California’s stringent COVID-19 health orders.
During a Tesla earnings call in April 2020, Musk declared lockdown orders to be “fascist” and demanded California politicians “give people back their God-damn freedom.”
“I think the people are going to be very angry about this and are very angry. It’s like somebody should be, if somebody wants to stay in the house that’s great, they should be allowed to stay in the house and they should not be compelled to leave,” the SpaceX founder said. “But to say that they cannot leave their house, and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their God-damn freedom.”
Musk first floated the idea of moving the electric vehicle company out of California in May 2020. After coronavirus orders temporarily shut down Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Musk declared that local leaders were “acting contrary” to “our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!”
“Tesla is filing a lawsuit against Alameda County immediately. The unelected & ignorant ‘Interim Health Officer’ of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!” Musk wrote on Twitter. “Frankly, this is the final straw. Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependent on how Tesla is treated in the future. Tesla is the last carmaker left in CA.”
At the time, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez – who represents San Diego – responded to Tesla’s head by lashing out, “F*** Elon Musk.”
“If a team has been winning for too long, they do tend to get a little complacent, a little entitled and then they don’t win the championship anymore,” Musk said during the Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO Council summit. “California has been winning for a long time. And I think they’re taking that for granted a little bit.”
Musk’s SpaceX aerospace company established a “Starbase” launch site in South Texas this year.
Tesla becomes the latest big-name company to ditch California. Oracle, Palantir, and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise relocated their headquarters out of California in 2020.
The New York Times was forced to correct an article about COVID-19 vaccinations for children after it grossly overreported the number of kids who have been hospitalized with the virus.
Should children in the U.S. get just one dose of the coronavirus vaccine?
Concerned about reports of heart problems after the second dose in some rare cases, many countries have decided to go with just one dose — for now.https://t.co/N6N5Csk7wZ
One day after publication, however, the Times changed the article text to claim that “63,000 children were hospitalized with Covid-19 from August 2020 to October 2021, and at least 520 have died.” That’s 837,000 fewer severely sick kids than the article first reported.
The corporate newsroom also added a correction notice at the bottom of the article notifying readers of at least three mistakes in the article.
“An earlier version of this article incorrectly described actions taken by regulators in Sweden and Denmark. They have halted use of the Moderna vaccine in children; they have not begun offering single doses,” the notice said.
The Times also clarified that “the article also misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children.”
“It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic,” the Times wrote. “In addition, the article misstated the timing of an F.D.A. meeting on authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children. It is later this month, not next week.”
While data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that at least 63,000 COVID-19-positive children were hospitalized since August 2020, it is unclear where the article’s author found the original 900,000 number. The Times did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.
Tuesday’s Senate hearing with Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen was part of a slick, well-produced rollout of a former Facebook employee, complete with a prerecorded and well-timed “expose” on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” harmonious media cheerleading, and paid Democratic consultants.
With this razzle-dazzle, the witness and her handlers want the audience to use the pretext of child protection to increase government power over Facebook, resulting in increased censorship, which likely will inure to the detriment of conservatives in the long run.
To identify—and avoid—the key takeaway of the hearing, members of Congress and the American public need to see through the glossy performance and focus on Haugen’s former role at Facebook and what she advocated for in the hearing; namely, more censorship of “misinformation.”
On the plus side, Haugen released Facebook documents and described troubling issues at the tech giant that are important for Americans to know and understand.
In its never-ending quest for growth, Facebook preys on younger children to set their eyes on the Instagram and Facebook platforms and to keep them there, despite knowing the dangerous—and even deadly—mental and emotional downstream effects that has on children, particularly girls.
Facebook has called teens creating Instagram accounts without parents’ knowledge a unique value proposition.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.—chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee’s Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security Subcommittee, which held yesterday’s hearing—called the effects of Instagram on teens an “addict’s narrative.”
He added, “The damage to self-interest and self-worth inflicted by Facebook today will haunt a generation.” He’s right.
While members of Congress and Americans can agree that social media companies should not prey on children, what members of Congress propose to address the many forms of abuse that such companies commit would result in drastically different consequences.
Investigating Facebook and other Big Tech companies for misleading consumers and advertisers, and for deceptively misrepresenting their products, is an available course of action for the Federal Trade Commission under current authorities, and the FTC should utilize them.
Blumenthal and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., both spoke at Tuesday’s hearing in favor of investigating and penalizing Facebook for such deception.
Facebook and other Big Tech companies warrant such scrutiny, transparency, and consequences based on any deceptive business practices.
A second overdue change discussed at the hearing was reforming Section 230, which provides internet service providers overbroad liability immunity for removing legal content that they consider “objectionable” from their platforms, and giving them a free pass for altering content posted by others by adding “truth banners” and the like while still claiming—falsely, in our view—that they are not “publishers” of the content on their platforms.
Since the 1996 government-provided protection, companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have accelerated and expanded content removal, labeling, and ranking beyond illegal activity and into content that should be distributed to encourage free speech and debate.
Companies should not be immune from lawsuits against this behavior when they are clearly acting as publishers.
Haugen testified as much when she stated that Facebook builds algorithms based on intentional ranking decisions. She correctly stated that Facebook should be held responsible, and not get a pass, for its ranking decisions and algorithm designs.
But government should not encourage or expand the current favorite tool of the left, companies such as Facebook, and Haugen herself; namely, identifying and removing “misinformation.”
Haugen was the lead product manager for “Civic Misinformation” at Facebook. She explained that Facebook changed its content defaults in the summer of 2020 for health (COVID-19) and civic (election) content because it knew “dangerous” content related to those issues was on the platform.
Haugen complained that after the election, Facebook returned to its prior content default settings to resume platform growth. She testified that Facebook betrayed its commitments to keep elections safe when it dissolved her civic integrity unit after the 2020 election.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., advocated for her legislation to hold digital platforms accountable for health misinformation posted online. Haugen lamented that Facebook does not have the capability to prevent COVID-19 misinformation because it overrelies on artificial intelligence to catch such content, and AI only catches a small fraction of it.
Americans should have visceral reactions against efforts to label and censor “misinformation.” COVID-19 and the 2020 election have shown that such labels are often proven wrong and that “misinformation” is a euphemism for content the left does not like or want shared.
Two prime examples were the Wuhan, China, lab being the source of COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop. News of the latter was likely suppressed by Haugen’s own team.
Haugen testified that Facebook wants to trick Congress into making limited changes and that company representatives use false choices—such as divisive content or losing free speech—to scare off significant reform.
Yet Haugen seeks to perpetuate dangerous censorship of lawful content regarding issues in need of open debate on all platforms.
Americans need to see through this setup of a “whistleblower” hearing and avoid being tricked into weaponizing so-called “misinformation” labeling and censorship.
Haugen testified that free speech-respecting social media are possible. It deserves more than just her lip service.
The September jobs report came out Friday morning and it’s worse than August’s numbers.
Biden’s joke of an economy only added 194,000 jobs in September and the unemployment rate fell by 0.4%, the US Bureau Labor Statistics reported.
The ‘experts’ predicted 500,000 jobs would be added but they were wrong again.
The CNBC panel was shocked as the September jobs numbers rolled in during a live broadcast.
Healthcare employment fell because of Biden’s vaccine mandates.
“Whoa, that’s real low,” CNBC’s Steve Liesman said. “Declines in nursing…not the numbers you need to put people back to work.”
VIDEO:
Joe Biden is an expert at killing jobs (and US servicemembers).
He killed tens of thousands of jobs his first day in office and continues to do so to this day.
Just yesterday Joe Biden defended “mass firings” and thousands of people losing their jobs because of his vax mandates.
“When you see headlines and reports of mass firings and hundreds of people losing their jobs, look at the bigger story,” Biden said bragging about his jobs-killing mandate.
Pfizer scientist Nick Karl, who privately admitted COVID antibodies are better than his company’s vaccine, was questioned by Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe while in public.
Nick Karl, who was not wearing a mask despite appearing to sit in a restaurant, was visibly surprised and upset when confronted by Project Veritas. He acknowledged his name, then became startled and refused to speak to O’Keefe as he abruptly rose and left the building.
Karl questioned, “I’m not doing this. Do not, absolutely not, what are you doing right now?” He then demanded to see video proving O’Keefe’s claims. When O’Keefe presented a tablet to view them, Karl fled the restaurant to his vehicle and drove away.
Karl, described by Project Veritas as an “experienced biochemist at Pfizer” with a history in pharmaceuticals, was caught in undercover video claiming that natural immunity provides a more robust antibody response to COVID-19 than the Pfizer vaccine.
“It’s just one antibody against one specific part of the virus,” said Karl while being recorded by a Project Veritas journalist. “When you actually get the virus, you’re going to start producing antibodies against like multiple pieces of virus.” Project Veritas also recorded two other Pfizer scientists who agree with this assessment.
— veritastips@protonmail.com🇺🇸 (@EricSpracklen) October 5, 2021
One scientist described Pfizer as an “evil corporation” even as Karl endorsed vaccine passports and severe restrictions for the unvaccinated in a bid to sell his company’s product.
“Basically our organization is run on COVID money now,” said Chris Croce, a Senior Associate Scientist for Pfizer. “You don’t talk about anything that can possibly implicate you or, like, Big Pharma. Even if you shut the door to the office it’s like, who is listening?”
– Antibodies are stronger than the vaccine – Pfizer is an evil corporation – Pfizer is run on COVID money now – Pfizer employees can’t say this publicly
— veritastips@protonmail.com🇺🇸 (@EricSpracklen) October 5, 2021
Croce said COVID-19 treatments were “pushed aside” due to financial interests. “It’s disgusting, he added. He added that Pfizer netted “over $15 billion” that year. He later admitted that Pfizer is currently investigating growing number of myocarditis complications in young people who receive after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.
Karl, meanwhile, recommended “vax cards” to increase vaccination rates. “It’s just about making it so inconvenient, for like, unvaccinated people.” He added that the government should use vaccine passports to prevent the unvaccinated from “doing anything” to force them to relent.
The CIA announced on Thursday the creation of a new China Mission Center to better strengthen the agency’s resolve against what it deemed to be the “most important geopolitical threat” to the United States.
In a statement, CIA Director William Burns said the new China Mission Center will “will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government.”
Another CIA senior official told CNN that the center will focus on issues “critical to US global competitiveness,” such as “global health, economic security, climate change and technology.”
In this April 14, 2021 file photo, CIA Director William Burns testifies during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing about worldwide threats, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Saul Loeb/Pool via AP)
The CIA also announced a Transnational and Technology Mission Center, which will work with the China Mission Center on issues of counterterrorism and counterintelligence, said CIA China analyst Rodney Faraon.
“The idea is that the closer they work together, with more communication and collaboration, the better the outcomes for collection and intelligence production. Better targeting of assets, better insight into human sourcing,” said Faraon.
Other high-priority mission centers for countries like Iran and North Korea will also be folded into a single mission center, which only amplifies how large of a global competitor China has become.
“The Iran and Korea mission centers will be folded into the Near East Mission Center and the East Asia and Pacific center, respectively,” noted CNN. “The Korea Mission Center had been created in 2017 to respond to the nuclear and missile threats from North Korea.”
Faraon said the converging of several mission centers should not be taken to mean that countries like Iran and North Korea have no importance.
Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, leads other Chinese leaders attending the fifth plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Beijing, China on Oct. 29, 2020. (Wang Ye/Xinhua via AP)
“Folding in the other missions into bigger centers is probably a function of resourcing and bureaucratic convenience. It doesn’t mean that the issues are less important,” he said. “But elevating China and [Technology] does indicate increased importance. It also better aligns CIA functions with counterparts at [the Departments of] State and Defense.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, the mission center will “bring together case officers who recruit spies, intelligence analysts, technology experts and other specialists in a single unit.”
“The spy agency will also recruit and train more Mandarin speakers and deploy China specialists around the world, reflecting the global nature of U.S.-China competition,” added the WSJ.
In December of 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence John Radcliffe said that U.S. spy agencies had increased spending on China-related issues by 20 percent.
The flag of China flies behind a security camera over the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, July 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
“This generation will be judged by its response to China’s effort to reshape the world in its own image and replace America as the dominant superpower. The intelligence is clear. Our response must be as well,” Ratcliffe wrote in an op-ed at the time.
“Beijing is preparing for an open-ended period of confrontation with the U.S. Washington should also be prepared. Leaders must work across partisan divides to understand the threat, speak about it openly, and take action to address it,” he added.
In an interview with Sean Hannity Thursday, President Trump urged that America cannot take much more of the Biden administration’s policies, urging that central American countries are being allowed to “empty their prisons into the U.S.”
Trump said that “All they (had) to do was leave (the border) alone. The wall was almost complete… one thing you didn’t see was drugs. Drugs were at their lowest point, in particular Fentanyl, which is a brutal drug. It was stopped, it was at a level we had not seen in a long time.”
“Now it’s coming in at levels that we have never seen: Three, four, five times more than we ever had coming in… There’s something wrong,” Trump added, further declaring “You wouldn’t believe you could even say this, but somebody doesn’t love our country.”
“When they allow this to happen to our country, we have hundreds of thousands of people pouring in every two weeks,” Trump emphasised, adding that Central American countries are “emptying their prisons into the United States.”
“Some of the toughest people on earth are being dumped into the United States because they don’t want them. They don’t want to take care of them for the next 40 years. These people that are the roughest prisoners, anywhere, are being dumped into the United States for us to take care of them,” the former President explained.
“What are they doing? They are destroying our country,” an exasperated Trump asked.
Elsewhere in the interview, Trump commented on the Biden administration targeting parents who do not want their children being subjected to vaccine mandates and the teaching of critical race theory in schools.
“The country can’t take much more of it, they can’t do it,” Trump said, adding “Those school parents — those are parents that love their country and they love their children. And they don’t want all of this nonsense that’s being fed to their children. They just don’t want it. And, you know, they are trying to make them out to be terrorists.”
Hundreds of thousands of Christian students nationwide were encouraged to bring their Bibles to school on Thursday as part of a Christian advocacy organization’s annual Bring Your Bible to School Day.
Focus on the Family spearheaded its eighth annual Bring Your Bible to School Day as students were emboldened to share the word of God with their classmates.
The purpose of the occasion is to have students “read and treasure Scripture as God’s Holy Word, to encourage others with the hope we have in Christ Jesus, and to celebrate our religious freedoms in the United States.”
“This annual campaign empowers Christian students of all ages to speak God’s grace and truth into the culture around them, starting with two simple steps — bringing their Bibles to school and sharing what God’s word means to them,” Focus on the Family Program Manager Bret Eckelberry said in a statement.
“It opens doors for students to talk to their friends about the gospel. It connects them with other believers in their school. And it allows them to celebrate their religious freedoms in the United States.”
Focus on the Family’s Vice President of Parenting and Youth Danny Huerta told The Christian Post that it was too early to say whether participation in this year’s event surpassed the more than 514,000 students who participated last year.
However, he noted that this year’s registration totals “surpassed last year’s registration numbers.”
“Our eventual goal is to get 1 million kids bringing their Bible to school or more,” he added. “It’s basically just a starting point … for kids to maybe start Bible studies in their school, [or] pray together in their school.”
Huerta said that while the bulk of participants in Bring Your Bible to School Day are high school students or junior high school students, students can participate “all through college.”
He emphasized that students have “the freedom to bring their Bible to school in a public school setting as long as they’re not disruptive in the school.” Huerta said lunch, recess as well as before and after school are appropriate times for students to share the word of God with others.
In the past, students attempting to participate in Bring Your Bible to School Day have faced headwinds from school staff despite their established right to do so.
Huerta told CP that the religious liberty law firm Alliance Defending Freedom “has been a resource that we have pointed parents to … and/or students that have faced that adversity.”
He stressed that as long as Bring Your Bible to School Day at a particular school is student-led, “a teacher can participate in it and a principal can participate in it.”
Huerta expressed hope that the annual day can unify American students at a time that has become very divisive.
“We’ve really been focused even more so now on the opportunity to offer hope, to invite peers and students into conversation about God’s word and about their faith and just standing courageously and with love and hope,” Huerta said.
“This is more about … [standing] united and pray[ing] for one another and lov[ing] our school, pray[ing] for our school, pray[ing] for our nation … engag[ing] in God’s word so that we’re guided and seek wisdom.”
He said the goal is “much more unity and love and hope rather than where the world is at right now.”
“It’s about inviting people into something that is very loving, which is a relationship with their Heavenly Father and with God’s word,” Huerta added.
As the coronavirus pandemic significantly changed the aspects of day-to-day life in the U.S. and around the world last year, Focus on the Family saw a new opportunity to engage with homeschool students.
“It gave us an opportunity to remind homeschool students that ‘Hey, you can also participate, go on social media, intentionally engage with God’s word throughout the day [and] share your favorite scriptures,” he said.
“As a homeschooled student, as a private school student, it’s so important to also participate in Bring Your Bible to School Day. And so through the pandemic … we did a full online Bring Your Bible to School Day where kids shared [pictures] of themselves with the Bible,” he recalled.
While Bring Your Bible to School Day only happens once a year, the Bring Your Bible to School Day website has activities that can help children and their families remain engaged with the Bible all year long.
“When they sign up and register, they get Live Your Faith challenges once a month,” he explained. “And so, it’s a starting point … either as a family or as a friend group … to live out their faith.”
Huerta sees Bring Your Bible to School Day and the “Live Your Faith” challenges as a way to create “contributors in God’s Kingdom’s story rather than consumers.”
New York Times Pretended 900,000 Kids Were Hospitalized With COVID… It’s More Like 63,000
The New York Times was forced to correct an article about COVID-19 vaccinations for children after it grossly overreported the number of kids who have been hospitalized with the virus.
In the Wednesday article “A New Vaccine Strategy for Children: Just One Dose, for Now,” one of the outlet’s science and global health reporters originally claimed that “nearly 900,000 children have been hospitalized with Covid-19 since the pandemic began, and about 520 have died.”
The article was amplified by dozens of blue checkmarks on Twitter and even promoted by the author.
One day after publication, however, the Times changed the article text to claim that “63,000 children were hospitalized with Covid-19 from August 2020 to October 2021, and at least 520 have died.” That’s 837,000 fewer severely sick kids than the article first reported.
The corporate newsroom also added a correction notice at the bottom of the article notifying readers of at least three mistakes in the article.
“An earlier version of this article incorrectly described actions taken by regulators in Sweden and Denmark. They have halted use of the Moderna vaccine in children; they have not begun offering single doses,” the notice said.
The Times also clarified that “the article also misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children.”
“It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic,” the Times wrote. “In addition, the article misstated the timing of an F.D.A. meeting on authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children. It is later this month, not next week.”
While data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that at least 63,000 COVID-19-positive children were hospitalized since August 2020, it is unclear where the article’s author found the original 900,000 number. The Times did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.