OPINION | You may not remember this, but the New York Times tried to lend credibility to ideological virologist Christian Drosten’s fake paper that claimed that children are highly infectious, while his data revealed the exact opposite, the Times is now hyping a hysteria story that a new Korean government study shows children between the ages of 10 and 19 are highly infectious.
The Korean government report, based on data from March and ignoring all newer research, does make that claim, with qualifications, in its narrative abstract.
Its actual math, nevertheless, reveals exactly the opposite. Does the “paper of record” ever bother to reach out to anyone who understands math?
As Professor Francois Balloux of the University of Lausanne Genetics Institute instantly replied, the Times writer fully misunderstood the report.
In fact, the report discovered that it was extremely rare for kids to bring an infection into their home. It found that only 2.7 percent of potential “index cases” (first case in the home) had been under age 20. Imagine twisting that into a call for school closures. It’s grossly negligent.
These liars at the Times have a Constitutional protection to tell the public the truth. How do deal with the media when they blatantly lie like this?
The report additionally did no genetic mapping and subsequently was unable to find out true index cases. The paper itself says, “We could not determine direction of transmission.” Contrast that with the contact tracing study from Iceland, which mapped haplotypes to determine direction of transmission and found it was virtually always parent to child.
The supposedly highly contagious 10-19 group had only 3.7 contacts per potential index patient, which is dwarfed by the adult categories. This report, to the extent it tells us something, signifies kids play no important position in neighborhood transmission, in line with all the most up-to-date analysis.
You’ll also discover the number of potential under-age-20 “index cases” in the report is 153, not the 65,000 suggested by the Times’ dishonest sub-headline.
Furthermore, grouping ages in 10-year bins destroys any potential meaning of age, which ought to be a continuous variable. Do you understand what that means? It means most, in not all, of infected contacts in the 10-19 group could actually be by 19-year-olds. A 19-year-old transmitting like an adult is not odd or suspicious at all, but the study tells us diddly squat about what age children become more like and adult to explain transmissions. Anyone who bins a continuous variable is cheating for a desired result, and that’s not science.
It’s funny how the Left says that conservatives don’t believe in science, while more and more we are discovering that leftists have corrupted science to tweak anything to push for their own preconceived notions. That’s not science.
Incredibly, this is the exact same error Drosten made in his own fake paper where he claimed children are super-spreaders. The Times hyped that story too, and after they were exposed, they never retracted or corrected it.
Alasdair Munro, the world’s foremost expert on pediatric Chinese virus pandemic chimed in:
So, now even the 2.7 percent of potential index cases of children under the age of 20 were more-than-likely not real index cases at all. There is a very strong reason to believe that they probably never infected adults in their families at all, while it’s possible that the adults were exposed at the same time as the children. This explains the large discrepancy between household and non-household contact among the 10 to 19 age group. Household infections are looking like they were a result of misidentifying index cases.
We find the Times in another embarrassing situation where they should stop hyping a lie for political reasons, and retract and fix the errors in their reporting, but they won’t, because liberals have learned since the Obama years that they can say any lie they want, because the time it takes for the lie to be discovered and taken to task over it is just enough time to do maximum damage. These days, even if they were to do a retraction, they know that most people would never hear about that, and a large portion wouldn’t believe the retraction anyway.
In the end, the real numbers in this research study, just add another knowledge level to the overwhelming case in opposition to school closures.
The Times did another hit piece on the truth. This time to help leftists make the argument that schools need to be closed because of the Chinese virus pandemic. But it’s all about harming Trump in November. Keeping kids home from school is another layer of the progressive scheme to make people so frightened to go outside they will demand vote-by-mail, and that’s how the Democrats think they will knock Trump out of the White House.
Rich is syndicated opinion columnist for David Harris Jr. and owner of Maga-Chat.com. He writes about politics, culture, liberty and faith.
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