Image 01 Image 03

New York Times Posts Lengthy Correction After Badly Botching Story on Vaccine Strategies for Children

New York Times Posts Lengthy Correction After Badly Botching Story on Vaccine Strategies for Children

The massive correction on, among other things, the number of COVID hospitalizations among U.S. children led some to ridicule the paper over forcing out veteran health and science reporter Don McNeil Jr. earlier this year over a fake “racism” scandal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl_v0yaPGyU&t=3s

Not only was this week a terrible one for so-called “fact-checkers” like the ones at the Associated Press and Politifact, but the New York Times found itself in a rather embarrassing situation after they had to issue a massive correction to a Wednesday report their health and science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli wrote on Wuhan coronavirus vaccine strategies for children.

In the original story, archived here, Mandavilli claimed that officials in Sweden and Denmark were “joining the ranks” of other countries by “announcing that adolescents should get only one jab of the Moderna vaccine.” She also reported that “nearly 900,000 [U.S.] children have been hospitalized with Covid-19 since the pandemic began”:

Officials in Britain, Hong Kong, Norway and other countries have recommended a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children ages 12 and older — providing partial protection from the virus, but without the potential harms occasionally observed after two doses. On Wednesday, Sweden and Denmark joined the ranks, announcing that adolescents should get only one jab of the Moderna vaccine.

[…]

Nearly 900,000 children have been hospitalized with Covid-19 since the pandemic began, and about 520 have died. Some children have developed so-called long Covid-19, in which symptoms can persist for months, and more than 4,000 have been diagnosed with a dangerous condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children.

Just in those two paragraphs alone were multiple errors, two of which were easily preventable if the reporter had simply looked at the very link she referenced.

On the claim about Sweden and Denmark, the Reuters report Mandavilli linked actually noted officials in both countries were pausing the use of the Moderna vaccine in young people, citing rare side effects.

Further, the false “900,000 children” claim about children in the U.S. who have been hospitalized should have been detected and fixed before the story was published since it’s widely known that severe Wuhan coronavirus cases among children requiring hospitalization are rare. This is something an award-winning science reporter like Mandavilli should have known without even having to look at the data.

There were other erroneous claims as well, which were indicated by the lengthy correction the New York Times posted at the bottom of the article the following day:

Correction: Oct. 7, 2021
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.

It’s been screengrabbed for posterity’s sake:

The Times was widely mocked on social media after the correction was revealed, especially among those who remember how the paper forced out veteran health and science reporter Don McNeil Jr. earlier this year over a fake “racism” scandal simply because triggered wokesters in the newsroom demanded it:

To add insult to injury, Mandavilli was the “2019 winner of the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting” as noted in both her New York Times author bio and on her Twitter page, which just goes to show that prestigious awards are not what they used to be, something legend-in-his-own mind Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, a longtime New York Times columnist, also reminds us of on an almost-daily basis.

— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —

DONATE

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.

Comments

Notice how the correction tells us what the error was for the number of cases reported, then gives the correction, but doesn’t do the same regarding Sweden? Just says “they halted use of Medera@, nothing about how the original article says the complete opposite.

Even the correction plays games. Makes it sound like little mistakes … got a number wrong, got a date wrong. No big deal. Say a government is doing the exact opposite of what they intend to do… let’s not put too much light on how we screw up reporting government action.

    “Correction” my ass. Their readers are too lame to put 2 and 2 together. So are the republishers of the NY Times propaganda.

    Lucifer Morningstar in reply to Doc-Wahala. | October 11, 2021 at 7:58 am

    In reality this paper should be retracted the article and the alleged “health & science reporter” that authored the paper should be either disciplined or fired for such outright sloppy, inaccurate reporting on the subject. Being the cynic I am, I cannot believe that Mandavilli didn’t know exactly what she was doing when she wrote that article with such fundamental factual errors. A person doesn’t screw up the facts like this by accident. It was a deliberate attempt to manufacture another “hit piece” that went badly awry as people called the inaccuracies out forcing this “correction” to be made.

Should this be categorized as what DJT would call fake news or is it false and misleading Covid content as the tech platforms would call it? Choice is yours d/progressive and tech; endorse the DJT concept of fake news or purge this reporter from online platforms for spreading false/misleading content. That we all know they will do neither tells us they are colluding to spread a propaganda narrative to support their favored policies. More and more people are waking up to this fact.

    henrybowman in reply to CommoChief. | October 9, 2021 at 11:26 am

    “what DJT would call fake news”

    Let us never forget the origin of the phrase “fake news.” It appeared fully-grown, as if sprung from the brow of Zeus, practically the day after the Democrats learned they had not won the 2016 election. It heralded the next front in the Democrat war against the truth, and was escorted to its debutante ball on television by none other than Barry 0bama, who apparently entirely overlooked the previous eight years of “fake news” generated in his favor to bolster his failure of a presidency.

    That the phrase became more strongly associated with Donald Trump is just a consequence of the fact that most of the fake news identified from that day on was generated by Marxist media outlets, and so Trump enjoyed a more target-rich environment than any Democrat did.

      Milhouse in reply to henrybowman. | October 10, 2021 at 1:31 pm

      Let us never forget the origin of the phrase “fake news.” It appeared fully-grown, as if sprung from the brow of Zeus, practically the day after the Democrats learned they had not won the 2016 election

      That is not true at all. It was first used in the political arena by Hillary Clinton, during the late campaign, to mean “news sources” that don’t even pretend to be true, such as the Onion and the Babylon Bee. They are literally “fake news”; they are deliberately designed to look like news, but in fact are not news, and openly say so. They’re entertainment, and make no bones about it. And she was complaining about stories that originated with them and were circulating as if they were actual news, and people were believing them.

      Then (still before the election) Trump adopted the term and repurposed it to mean stories from sources that do claim to report the actual news, but which are no less fake than the parody stories. When a story from CNN has no more credibility than one from the Bee the distinction between them becomes mostly irrelevant. Except of course that the Bee is honest, and therefore less fake.

“All The News We Wish Were True.”

“Mistakes” this big are not really mistakes.
They LIE.
Sometimes they get away with it. When caught, they issue a half-arse correction. not really telling the truth. But by that time the original lie already took 2 full laps around the world.

This has been standard operating procedure for a long time.

The NYT is, and always has been, and anti-American shit-rag.

    henrybowman in reply to Paul. | October 9, 2021 at 11:32 am

    Again, never forget complicity of the NYT in allowing Walter Duranty to laud that titan among statesmen, Josef Stalin, “guardian of a sacred flame,” by outright lying about the existence of famines and prison camps. For fourteen years.
    “Years later, there continue to be calls to revoke his Pulitzer, which to this day still has not occurred.”

    JHogan in reply to Paul. | October 9, 2021 at 1:43 pm

    Which is why The New York ‘Marx Was Right’ Times is often referred to as Pravda on the Hudson.

nordic_prince | October 9, 2021 at 1:29 pm

Gee, facts keep on getting in the way of the narrative. Imagine that.

How many parents would want to have their kids vaccinated after being informed of the following?

— there are no existing studies (because there can’t be), and at this time no planned formal studies (AFAIK), of the long term effects of the not-a-vaccine vaccines;

— the normal approval process for previous vaccines required a 5-10 year study for long term effects before approval;

— short term side effects are essentially not being formally tracked or studied and data about potential side effects is being suppressed or dismissed;

— the survival rate for those age 14 and under is 99.9998%;

— children are more likely to die from the seasonal flu than from Covid.

And why aren’t parents being informed of these things before being asked to consent, if asked to consent at all, to the vaccination of their kids?

Via CRT indoctrination in schools and forced vaccination of kids our radical leftwing fascist Regime is shoving parents aside and assuming the role of authoritarian elitists who know better. Historically echoing the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

FJB

And that does not say how many of the 63,000 children hospitalized were:
1. immigrants or children of very recent immigrants
2. hospitalized with complications of COVID-19
3. hospitalized for some other reason who tested positive for COVID-19
4. the age range of these “children”

Purely accidental gaffes, all in the same (expected) direction, purely by coincidence!

If we ever get control back I’d like to see people rot in prison for this sort of thing.