The Alleged Surge in Child COVID Hospitalizations Is Fake News
By Matt Margolis Dec 29, 2021 10:43 AM ET
AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File
On Tuesday, NBC News reported that child COVID hospitalizations are up, and have increased at "twice the rate of adults in the past 4 weeks."
It sounds scary, doesn't it? The children! The poor children! You better get your kids vaccinated, or they'll be next.
Hogwash. While many people will read the headline and the opening paragraphs and think that omicron is coming to kill their children, you have to read well past the headline and the opening paragraph to see the truth:
"It's winter, and this is a winter virus, and this omicron is particularly contagious, so I think you were going to see an increase anyway," said Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at [Children's Hospital of Philadelphia].
However, he said, his hospital has seen a lot of kids test positive for Covid without necessarily showing symptoms or getting sick.
"We test anybody who's admitted to the hospital for whatever reason to see whether or not they have Covid, and we're definitely seeing an increase in cases. However, we're really not seeing an increase in children who are hospitalized for Covid or in the intensive care unit for Covid," Offit said.
NBC News made it sound as if kids are being hospitalized because of COVID, when, in fact, kids are being admitted to the hospital for other reasons, and are found to be COVID positive, but asymptomatic.
VIP: Five Reasons Not to Vaccinate Your Kids From COVID
Make no mistake about it, the media is trying to scare you into getting your children vaccinated against COVID. But kids are overwhelmingly safe from COVID. School-age children have a COVID recovery rate of 99.997%—better than their mortality risk from the seasonal flu.
In fact, unvaccinated kids are better protected from COVID than vaccinated adults.
"In assessing an individual's risk of dying from covid, age appears still as important—and maybe even more important—than vaccination status," noted David Wallace-Wells of New York Magazine in September.
NBC News should be ashamed of its blatantly misleading headline.
Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama, and The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama.
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Tags: MEDIA BIAS