As the Supreme Court takes up the live controversy over President Biden’s attempt to enforce vaccine mandates on private businesses via the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), New York Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak made the lead slot Saturday: “Conservative Majority on Supreme Court Appears Skeptical of Biden’s Vaccine Plan.”
But Liptak’s 1,500-word back and forth included not a single sentence about an appalling piece of Covid disinformation, offered as fact during Friday’s oral arguments, by Obama appointee Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Arguing in favor of the need for the mandates, Sotomayor claimed “There are more than 100,000 kids, some in very serious conditions and others on ventilators..”
This is far from the truth. Right now, the actual 7-day average number of Covid patients under 18 years old is less than 800. Sotomayor also stated falsely that “Omicron is as deadly and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as Delta did.” It’s a particularly galling omission by the TimesHypersensitive to misinformation from conservatives.
The silence of the Times is only following along with the network evening news programs in suppressing Sotomayor’s gross Covid falsehoods.
Linda Qiu, their fact-checker, is missing. Maybe she’s exhausted from a series of January 6 misinformation checks. Even Qiu’s previous employer PolitiFact, historically reluctant to call out liberals, was compelled to rebut Sotomayor’s gaffe about the number of children with severe Covid.
Liptak’s life began:
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed to be leaning on Friday toward blocking one of the White House’s main pandemic-fighting strategies, expressing skepticism that the Biden administration has the legal power to mandate that large employers require workers to be vaccinated or to undergo frequent testing.
The oral argument over that mandate, which rocketed to the court on an emergency basis after a flurry of legal challenges around the nation from Republican-led states, business groups and others, raised the prospect that the court might deal a severe blow to the Biden administration’s efforts to address the coronavirus as the highly transmissible Omicron variant continues to spread.
….
The court’s three more liberal justices said the mandate was a needed response to the public health crisis.
Interestingly, of those three liberal justices (Kagan, Breyer, Sotomayor), Sotomayor was the only one he didn’t quote, while Kagan was quoted repeatedly. Liptak’s description of Sotomayor shows she is the most Covid-cautious of the justices.
Due to the pandemic, some participants were absent from courtroom. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was a diabetic and the last member of the court who wore a mask in the October courtroom. However, she participated remotely from her chambers.
The paper has previously attacked conservative justices in the past for making this bias-by-omission a doublestandard. The paper’s former Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse declared “flatly wrong” alleged misstatements by a conservative justice made during oral argument against her favorite decision, Roe V. Wade. Even the newspaper went after the wife a conservative justice because she spread conspiracies about conservatives.
About Post Author
