OCTOBER 07, 2021
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."
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