Democrats, Big Tech social media companies and the mainstream liberal media have spent two years raging about the spread of coronavirus misinformation, pointing their fingers at conservatives resisting government efforts to curb the disease’s spread via lockdowns, mask requirements and vaccine mandates.
But it turns out the source of some of the worst pandemic myths wasn’t right-wing podcasters booted from Twitter for the sin of disagreeing with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
They came from liberal Supreme Court justices.
On Friday, the high court heard oral arguments about the Biden administration’s push to impose vaccine mandates on private employers. The case involves a dubious effort to twist Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations meant to prevent health hazards specific to the workplace to include diseases that can be caught anywhere. But this problematic expansion of government power over the private sector and the rights of individuals to govern what is put into their bodies — the mantra of “My body, my choice” apparently only applies to abortions — was not the main takeaway.
Instead, it was the whoppers about the COVID threat from the three members of the court’s liberal faction.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor falsely asserted that COVID deaths are at an all-time high and the Omicron variant, which produces mild symptoms, “is as deadly as Delta.” Most egregiously she claimed, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators.”
As even CDC chief Rochelle Walensky later conceded, fewer than 5,000 children are in hospitals with COVID. Many, if not most, were not hospitalized for COVID but merely tested positive on admission for another ailment. And children are, as they have been throughout the pandemic, the least affected by the virus.
The same is true for hospitalized adults, with Walensky admitting that at least 40 percent of all cases counted as COVID are not people who required hospitalization because of the virus. Most of those who have died have had up to four comorbidities that were responsible for their plight.
Sotomayor was not alone in spreading misinformation.
Justice Elena Kagan claimed vaccines and masks prevent the spread of the disease: Workers, she said, “have to get vaccinated so that you’re not transmitting the disease that can kill elderly Medicare patients, that can kill sick Medicaid patients. I mean, that seems like a pretty basic infection prevention measure.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t true. The vaccine reduces the seriousness of COVID in those afflicted, but it doesn’t stop the vaccinated from catching or spreading it.
Justice Stephen Breyer also falsely asserted that the vaccine prevents infection, hospitals are overflowing with COVID patients at death’s door and the country reported “750 million new cases” the day before — though America’s total population is around 330 million.
It’s fair to ask how three of the people who are supposedly among the smartest in the land could be so poorly informed. But it also speaks volumes about the way the mainstream media has helped spread COVID dishonesty intended to fuel the kind of fear of the disease that lies behind these fibs.
Misinformation has come from those who dwell in the fever swamps of the far right and the far left. But some of the worst of the fallacies about the pandemic have come from public health officials and their dutiful enablers in the mainstream media.
Bent on scaring people into compliance with arbitrary rules that have changed continuously as they’ve reacted to a crisis for which they were unprepared, the experts have often encouraged the kind of exaggerations and mistakes that the three Supreme Court liberals repeated.
The high court hearing wasn’t just fodder for a fact check that earned liberal judges scorn. It should be a wake-up call for the rest of us to understand that the real problem here isn’t a disease. It’s the way those who ought to know better have gone along with fearmongering intended to quash opposition to the most heavy-handed COVID regulations regardless of the truth.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org.
Twitter: @jonathans_tobin
