PolitiFact slammed liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor for claiming during oral arguments over the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate on Friday that more than 100,000 children were in “serious condition” due to the coronavirus.
“We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators” due to coronavirus, Sotomayor said.
PolitiFact rated the statement as “False,” writing in-part:
While the number of coronavirus-positive pediatric hospitalizations has risen with the spread of the omicron variant, Sotomayor’s number was way off.
At the time she made this comment, federal data showed that fewer than 5,000 coronavirus-positive children were in the hospital. In fact, fewer than 83,000 children have been hospitalized for COVID-19 — cumulatively — since August 2020.
There are over 100,000 cases among children, but scientists say that few of those are severe.
NEW: Justice Sonia Sotomayor said during oral arguments today that “we have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators” due to the coronavirus. That's False. https://t.co/9itoVd1s1L pic.twitter.com/zX8Nf6Bx8r
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) January 8, 2022
“Omicron is as deadly as delta and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as delta did,” Sotomayor also claimed. “The numbers—look at the hospitalization rates going up. We have more infected people today than we did a year ago in January. 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, and many on ventilators.'”
On Wednesday, White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that “multiple sources of now-preliminary data indicate a decrease severity with Omicron.”
The news comes as the U.S. has shattered global records this week for new daily coronavirus cases, despite Democrat President Joe Biden’s pledge to “shut down the virus.”
“No, I don’t think COVID is here to stay, but having COVID in the environment here and in the world is probably here to stay,” Biden said. “COVID as we’re dealing with it now is not here to stay, the normal doesn’t have to be. We have so many more tools we developed and we continue to develop that can contain COVID and other strains of COVID.”
Biden’s comments about how he thinks coronavirus is not “here to stay” and that his administration can develop strategies to “contain” it do appear to challenge the advice that Biden was given by six experts this week.
Six former advisers who counseled him during the presidential transition wrote this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association that it was time for Biden to change strategies to something geared toward living with the virus.
The CDC reported that on January 20, 2021, at 1:16 p.m., there were 400,306 deaths recorded in the U.S. from the coronavirus. Biden officially became president of the United States at noon on that day.
Since then, the number of people who have died from coronavirus under Biden’s watch is now well over 429,000, according to recent figures.
This report has been updated to include additional information.