Video: NY health commissioner admits using overblown claims about child COVID hospitalizations to scare parents into vaccinating their kids



New York's acting health commissioner, Dr. Mary Bassett, openly admitted this week to misleading people about an "upward trend" in child COVID-19 hospitalizations in order to "motivate" parents to get their children vaccinated.

What are the details?

Last Friday, the state health department issued a health alert notifying pediatricians of a concerning trend — hospitalizations among children with COVID-19 were up across the state and had quadrupled in the New York City area. No official numbers were given.

The news quickly garnered attention in the state, worrying parents about their children's safety amid the surge of the new Omicron variant. Only it turns out the number of children hospitalized with the virus at the time was relatively low and the numbers were deceptively framed in order to encourage vaccinations.

In a press conference Monday alongside Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, Bassett — who came down with the virus last week despite being fully vaccinated against it — effectively acknowledged that the state health department's misleadingly framed the numbers to scare parents.

“The numbers that we gave on pediatric admissions weren’t intended to make it seem that children were having an epidemic of infection, these were small numbers," Bassett admitted regarding the alert. "That was based on 50 hospitalizations, and I've now given you some larger numbers, but they're still small numbers."

“It really was to motivate pediatricians and families to seek the protection of vaccination," she then stated.

Sorry to bust up the manipulation ploy.pic.twitter.com/y9msS5K3sq
— Bethany S. Mandel (@Bethany S. Mandel) 1640751324

"Many people continue to think that children do not become infected with COVID. This is not true," Bassett continued. "Children become infected with COVID and some will become hospitalized. The vaccination coverage remains too low."

"We need to get child vaccinations up, particularly in the 5-to-11-year-old age group," she argued.

What else?

Using blatant scare tactics to encourage people towards a specific action is bad enough, but it's made worse by the possibility that the supposedly concerning numbers were artificially inflated.

In a report about the uptick published Tuesday, NBC News noted that the larger numbers of hospitalizations likely include asymptomatic children brought to the hospital for reasons other than infection with the virus.

Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told NBC his hospital had seen many kids test positive for the virus recently who hadn't shown symptoms or come in with a sickness.

"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.

Offit's explanation is backed up by Department of Health and Human Services policy. NBC News noted that hospital patients are counted as COVID-19 hospitalizations even if they were not originally admitted to the hospital for that reason so long as they are suspected of having the disease or display a laboratory-confirmed positive for the disease.

New York Times issues correction after egregiously exaggerating coronavirus child hospitalizations



The New York Times issued a lengthy correction after numerous mistakes in an article about coronvirus vaccinations for children, including the egregious exaggeration of coronavirus hospitalizations among U.S. children.

The article by Apoorva Mandavilli documented how the U.S. is forging ahead on full vaccination for children while other countries are experimenting with just one shot after weighing the risks.

Health officials in those countries are particularly worried about increasing data suggesting that myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, may be more common among adolescents and young adults after vaccination than had been thought.

But in documenting the extent of the coronavirus pandemic among children in the U.S., Mandavilli missed the mark by a wide margin.

The Times issued a correction noting several issues with the article.

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 to wildly overestimating child hospitalizations, the article misreported how Sweden and Denmark were dealing with child vaccinations, and misreported on the timing of a meeting of health officials about child vaccines.

The correction widely mocked on Twitter.

Mandavilli previously made headlines when she opined in a tweet that the lab leak theory for the origin of the coronavirus had "racist roots." She later deleted the tweet after online backlash noting that many experts had affirmed the possibility of a laboratory origin of the pandemic.

Nevertheless, she persisted in her error.

"A theory can have racist roots and still gather reasonable supporters along the way," she added in a second missive. "Doesn't make the roots any less racist or the theory any more convincing, though."

Here's more about vaccination efforts for children:

Parents split over vaccinating kids for COVIDwww.youtube.com

Studies find California child hospitalizations from COVID-19 were 'grossly inflated' by at least 40% — findings 'likely' to be the same across US



The reported number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 in California was "grossly inflated," potentially leading policymakers and parents to believe kids were at higher risk from the virus than they actually are, according to two new studies.

"Hospital Pediatrics," a journal of medicine for pediatric care, published two research papers Wednesday that found child hospitalizations for COVID-19 were over-counted by at least 40% in the state, and researchers believe it's likely national numbers were similarly inflated. New York magazine reported commentary from Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleague Amy Beck, an associate professor of pediatrics, that explained the studies' findings.

"Taken together, these studies underscore the importance of clearly distinguishing between children hospitalized with SARS-CoV-2 found on universal testing versus those hospitalized for COVID-19 disease," they wrote. The reported hospitalization rates "greatly overestimate the true burden of COVID-19 disease in children." In an interview, Gandhi told New York magazine "there is no reason to think these findings would be exclusive to California. This sort of retrospective chart review will likely reveal the same findings across the country."

New York magazine summarized the key findings from the two studies:

In one study, conducted at a children's hospital in Northern California, among the 117 pediatric SARS-CoV2-positive patients hospitalized between May 10, 2020, and February 10, 2021, the authors concluded that 53 of them (or 45 percent) "were unlikely to be caused by SARS-CoV-2." The reasons for hospital admission for these "unlikely" patients included surgeries, cancer treatment, a psychiatric episode, urologic issues, and various infections such as cellulitis, among other diagnoses. The study also found that 46 (or 39.3 percent) of patients coded as SARS-CoV2 positive were asymptomatic. In other words, despite patients' testing positive for the virus as part of the hospital's universal screening, COVID-19 symptoms were absent, therefore it was not the reason for the hospitalization. Any instance where the link between a positive SARS-CoV2 test and cause of admission was uncertain the authors erred toward giving a "likely" categorization.

In the second study, at the fifth-largest children's hospital in the country, out of 146 records listing patients as positive for SARS-CoV-2 from May 1, 2020, to September 30, 2020, the authors classified 58 (40 percent) as having "incidental" diagnosis, meaning there was no documentation of COVID-19 symptoms prior to hospitalization. Like the first study, and as has been typical around the nation, this hospital implemented universal testing of inpatients for SARS-CoV-2. An example of incidentally SARS-CoV-2-positive patients are those who came to the hospital because of fractures. Patients who may have had COVID-19 symptoms but who had a clearly documented alternative reason for them, such as a child with abdominal pain and fever found to be related to an abdominal abscess, were also deemed to have incidental diagnosis. The study categorized 68 patients, or 47 percent, as "potentially symptomatic," which was defined as when "COVID-19 was not the primary reason for admission for these patients, and COVID-19 alone did not directly require hospitalization without the concomitant condition." Examples of these patients were those with acute appendicitis, since that condition includes gastrointestinal symptoms that may also present in COVID-19.

There are two important implications of these findings. The first is that policies that disproportionally affect children, like school closures or the cancellation of youth sports or summer camps, were implemented after reports greatly overstated the risk of children being hospitalized from COVID-19.

"Children have suffered tremendously due to policies that have kept schools and recreational facilities closed to them, and the burden has been greatest on children who are low-income and English-language learners," the researchers noted in their commentary. New York magazine pointed out "the hospitalization numbers for children were already extremely low relative to adults — at the pandemic's peak this winter, it was roughly ten times lower than for 18-to-49-year-olds and 77 times lower than those age 65 and up." If 40% of those hospitalizations were reported inaccurately, the actual rates are "vanishingly small," and those policies implemented to protect children may have done far more harm than good.

The second implication relates to the Food and Drug Administration's "emergency use authorization" for COVID-19 vaccines for children. If the studies' findings show that COVID-19 "poses a dramatically lower incidence of pediatric hospitalizations than the data have shown thus far," then the need for an emergency authorization of vaccines for kids to protect them from going to the hospital is perhaps less than previously thought.

Stefan Baral, an infectious diseases epidemiologist and physician at Johns Hopkins, told New York magazine the studies' findings "reinforce the importance of going through a meaningful process to understand the risks to children" from the vaccines.

The FDA on Monday approved Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 12-15 under its emergency use authorization, finding that the vaccine is safe and effective for individuals 12 and older.