New York Times Issues Messy Correction for Error-Riddled Covid Story

Rudy TakalaOct 8th, 2021, 2:12 pm
 
The sign on the west side of the New York Times building at 620 Eighth Ave. April 28, 2016 in New York.

Don Emmert/Getty Images

The New York Times issued a wide range of corrections on Thursday to a story about Covid-19, noting, among other things, that it inflated the number of children hospitalized with the virus by nearly 1,500 percent.

The story was published on Wednesday and authored by the paper’s Apoorva Mandavilli, a 2019 winner of the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. It originally indicated that Sweden and Denmark would allow children to get one dose of the Moderna vaccine, despite concerns over heart ailments stemming from it. It also suggested that 900,000 children in the United States had been hospitalized due to Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic — a number the paper revised to 63,000 over a 14-month period.

“An earlier version of this article incorrectly described actions taken by regulators in Sweden and Denmark,” Thursday’s correction noted. “They have halted use of the Moderna vaccine in children; they have not begun offering single doses. The article also misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children. It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic. In addition, the article misstated the timing of an F.D.A. meeting on authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children. It is later this month, not next week.”

The Food and Drug Administration is actually scheduled to meet Oct. 26 to consider an Emergency Use Authorization allowing Pfizer and BioNTech to use their Covid-19 vaccine in children aged 5-11.

The scope of the correction attracted critics online, among them Glenn Greenwald and  Phil Kerpen.

“I see this NYT reporter is meeting her usual standards today,” Kerpen wrote on Twitter.

“NYT had an outstanding, highly experienced COVID reporter,” Greenwald opined, a reference to Donald McNeil Jr. “But [he] was fired because he made very rich teenagers unhappy when forced to entertain them on a paid trip. Now we have an incompetent in his place constantly doing this, or saying it’s racist to investigate COVID origins.”

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