Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed last week that 100,000 children were in “serious condition” with COVID-19 — the real number is closer to 5000 — and the hosts of ABC’s “The View” shrugged it off: “It happens.”
Sotomayor made the erroneous statement during oral arguments on President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates — both for health care workers and for corporations with more than 100 employees:
“We have hospitals that are almost at full capacity with people severely ill on ventilators. We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, many on ventilators,” she said.
Critics quickly refuted the claim — The Washington Post called it “wildly incorrect,” citing data from the U.S. government suggesting that pediatric hospitalizations were around 5000, including observation beds. And Fox News anchor Bret Baier directly challenged Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky to correct Sotomayor’s statement, noting that the most recent data he had seen suggested there were some 3500 pediatric COVID-19 patients in U.S. hospitals.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky refutes Justice Sotomayor’s statement that “over 100,000 children” are hospitalized due to COVID, with “many on ventilators”:
ANCHOR: “The number’s not 100,000. It’s roughly 3,500 in hospitals now?”
WALENSKY: “Yes.” pic.twitter.com/EGxFpWaBbH
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 9, 2022
By all accounts, Sotomayor’s numbers were off — by upwards of 95,000 — but the hosts of “The View” argued that the real problem was that not enough people had gotten vaccinated yet.
“Well, first I just want to re-frame this a little bit about Justice Sotomayor,” Sunny Hostin began. “Well, you know, she may not be accurate for current hospitalizations in children she’s correct that we have more children in the hospital now more than ever before, and it’s certainly reflects the current cases in children, right now, we have 82,843 children sick with COVID. More than a 1,000 children have died from the virus. In addition, about 7.8 million children have caught COVID since the pandemic started, and so those are just the numbers and so, while fewer than 83,000 kids have been hospitalized with the virus we have kids sick with COVID more than we ever have before so that’s a real thing and those are real numbers.”
The View’s Sunny Hostin says even though Justice Sotomayor was wrong on the facts, she was still right on the facts “That’s a real thing and those are real numbers.” pic.twitter.com/7XWbtFGfFj
— Caleb Howe (@CalebHowe) January 10, 2022
Hostin went on to say that she wasn’t ready to adopt the CDC’s new, relaxed guidance reducing the recommended isolation time from ten days to five and no longer requiring a negative test.
“I don’t believe that, I think that after five days if you’re not testing you can certainly still be infectious and you can certainly still spread the virus the other people, and I have to wonder, Whoopi, I mean, is it a business decision that was made? Is it that there’s a staff shortage? Is it that there’s a shortage of essential workers? And they just need people to get back to work because there are so many unvaccinated people? … I think people just need to get with the program and get vaccinated.”
“I want to say, you know, about Sotomayor — Justice Sotomayor, Sonia Sotomayor — I think she made a mistake in her numbers, she’s not the first Supreme Court justice to make a mistake nor will she be the last, it happens,” cohost Ana Navarro added, noting that the number that had really stood out to her was one given by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. “He said there were 140,000 school age children at that time who have lost at least one parent to COVID, there are children who are in terrible conditions right now, going through grief because of what COVID has cost our children and the way to get to herd immunity is for all of us to get vaccinated.”
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