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.

'He's profiting off the over 30,000 New Yorkers, including my in-laws, that died': Janice Dean calls out Gov. Cuomo's hypocrisy



Fox News senior meteorologist Janice Dean is perhaps even more disgusted with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) for his coronavirus response than BlazeTV's Stu Burguiere (read what Stu has to say on the subject here), and for a good reason.

She lost both of her in-laws to COVID-19 in New York's nursing homes after Gov. Cuomo's infamous nursing home mandate, which Cuomo has since had scrubbed from the state's website and blamed everyone from the New York Post to nursing care workers to (every leftist's favorite scapegoat) President Donald Trump.

Janice joined Glenn and Stu on the "Glenn Beck Radio Program" Tuesday to ask why mainstream media is not holding Gov. Cuomo — who recently published a book about his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic — accountable?

"I'm vocal because I have not seen the mainstream media ask these questions or demand accountability of their leaders. [Cuomo] really has been ruling with an iron fist, and every time he does get asked a question, he blames everybody else except the person that signed that order," Janice said.

"In my mind, he's profiting off the over 30 thousand New Yorkers, including my in-laws, that died by publishing a book on 'leadership' of New York," she added. "His order has helped kill thousands of relatives of New York state. And this is not political, Glenn. This is not about Republican or Democrat. My in-laws were registered Democrats. This is not about politics. This is about accountability for something that went wrong, and it's because of your [Cuomo's] leadership that we're put into this situation."

Watch the video excerpt from the show below:


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Mark Levin: New York CAUGHT deleting Gov. Cuomo's order linked to COVID-19 nursing home death toll



BlazeTV's Mark Levin has said it before, but New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) completely bungled his coronavirus response, has lied about it over and over again, and now he's doing everything he can to cover up his tracks.

Why didn't he use the medical ship that remained effectively empty in NYC, or the Javits field hospital for COVID-19 medical treatments? "Federal guidelines" had nothing to do with it, Levin said.

Remember Gov. Cuomo's March 25 order that required nursing homes to admit patients who were suspected to have or had tested positive for COVID-19, and even prohibited patients from being tested prior to admission or readmission? Well, the state has apparently deleted any evidence that the order ever existed. The state of New York's website now displays an error message in place of a link to the original document.

Unfortunately for Gov. Cuomo, the internet is forever and a copy of the page has been saved by Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Check out the screen shot below:

Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/

And now, according to an Associated Press report, New York's official count of nursing home residents who died after Gov. Cuomo's controversial order "could actually be a significant undercount," and Cuomo continues to refuse any investigation into his state's handling of nursing homes during the pandemic.

Watch the video below to hear more from Mark Levin:



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