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Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is getting hit with a ton of corrections after a humiliating display by her during arguments about President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for private businesses.
On Friday the liberal justice, and both of her liberal colleagues, showed how much they do not know about the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccines, and now fact check websites and the Centers For Disease Control director are setting her straight.
“Catching COVID keeps people out of the workplace for extraordinary periods of time,” the justice said.
And she said that “those numbers show that omicron is as deadly and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as delta did,” even as studies show that the Omicron variant is significantly less severe.
She also made the false claim that “hospitals are almost all full capacity,” and said that more than 100,000 children are hospitalized with COVID and on ventilators, which is also not true.
“The current national pediatric COVID census per HHS is 3,342. Many/most incidental,” Phil Kerpen said.
This is just absolutely astonishing. "100,000 children in serious condition," per Sotomayor. Where do these people obtain their misinformation? The current national pediatric COVID census per HHS is 3,342. Many/most incidental.
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) January 7, 2022
PolitiFact, which is not a conservative site by any means, rated the Justice’s claims as false.
“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,” it said on Twitter with a link to its fact check.
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
“In all, 82,842 COVID-positive children 17 and younger have been admitted to the hospital since Aug. 1, 2020, according to CDC data,” it said.
“The most recent data available as of Sotomayor’s remark showed 3,342 children were currently hospitalized for confirmed COVID-19, according to federal data. That number rises to 4,652 children if suspected coronavirus cases are included,” the fact checking website said.
“Both figures represent less than 5% of the number Sotomayor cited,” it said.
It went on to give its ruling on here figures.
“While the number of coronavirus-positive pediatric hospitalizations has risen with the spread of the omicron variant, Sotomayor’s number was way off,” the website said.
“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,” it said.
“There are over 100,000 cases among children, but scientists say that few of those are severe.
“We rate the statement False,” it said.
And on Sunday CDC Director Rochelle Walensky corrected the Justice.
“The number is not 100,000. It’s roughly 3500 in hospitals now?” “Fox News Sunday” host Bret Baier said.
“Yes. In fact, what I will say is, while pediatric hospitalizations are rising, they’re still about 15 fold less than hospitalizations of our older age or age demographic,” the CDC Director said.
https://twitter.com/teribrookins/status/1480201397664563209?s=20
The two other liberal justices made equally ridiculous statements.
“There’s nothing else that will perform that function better than incentivizing people strongly to vaccinate themselves. So, you know, whatever necessary means, whatever grave means, why isn’t this necessary and grave?” Justice Elena Kagan said, suggesting that the vaccine stops the spread of COVID-19, which current data suggests is not the case.
“We do not contest that COVID is a grave danger,” National Federation of Independent Business attorney Scott Keller responded. “But when the power for it to be necessary… an agency has to consider and explain alternatives.”
Justice Stephen Breyer also appeared to believe that being vaccinated would stop people from spreading the virus, and argued that the argument that more people would leave the workforce due to the mandates was moot because “more may quit when they discover they have to work together with unvaccinated others because that means they may get the disease.”
“And more will quit because they’ll maybe die, or maybe they will be in the hospital, or maybe they’ll be sick and have to stay home for two weeks,” he said.
He also appeared to claim that if everyone was vaccinated the pandemic would stop and no one would get the disease before saying that there were “750 million new cases yesterday,” in the United States, even though the population of the United States is around 331 million people.
