While washed-up musicians, D-list celebrities, and the White House try to force Spotify to dump Joe Rogan over COVID-19 “misinformation,” MSNBC is broadcasting it without so much as batting an eye.
“With the omicron variant, kids are either going to get the vaccine or they’re likely to get a serious condition of omicron,” Dr. Zeke Emanuel said on the network. Emanuel, once a member of President Joe Biden’s transition COVID-19 Advisory Board, said it was a “serious problem” that parents were not getting their children vaccinated.
Host Kristen Welker offered no pushback to this flagrant falsehood.
Emanuel’s claim that children will either get vaccinated or get a “serious condition of omicron” has no basis in reality whatsoever. It runs against all the data we have seen up to this point. This is COVID-19 misinformation by any metric, yet it is being repeatedly promoted on MSNBC’s Twitter feed.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the omicron variant was the dominant strain of the virus by Dec. 20 of last year and “had been detected in most states and territories.” Omicron still, by all indications, is a milder variant of the virus but is more contagious. Hospitalizations among children did surge in the last few months, but they usually do around this time of year. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is as big of a COVID-19 alarmist as anyone, noted that the surge was because many children were going to the hospitals for other issues and then testing positive for COVID-19 upon arrival.
Even with that caveat, the total number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic according to the CDC is 7,025. There are roughly 73 million children in the United States.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, 0.1% to 1.5% of COVID-19 cases among children in 24 states result in hospitalization. With data updated through Jan. 31 and examining the numbers from 46 states, 0.00%-0.02% of COVID-19 cases in children result in death. That is a decrease from the academy’s numbers in August, which determined that 0.00%-0.03% of cases resulted in death.
Emanuel’s claim that unvaccinated children are “likely” to get “a serious condition of omicron” is just hogwash — total misinformation. There is no basis for it whatsoever, yet it was broadcast on MSNBC and has been pushed by the network on social media.
Will the White House call on TV companies to be “responsible and vigilant” in addressing MSNBC’s COVID-19 misinformation, as it did with Rogan and Spotify? Will it call for cable providers to drop this misinformation network?
Don’t hold your breath.
