The New York Times (NYT) issued a correction to one of its stories this week, which significantly overstated the number of U.S. children who have been hospitalized for COVID-19.
The article discussed how countries were moving to “revisit the one-dose strategy” due to concerns over health data suggesting myocarditis was more common in children who receive the COVID-19 vaccine than previously thought. Conversely, the U.S. has not changed its guidance on the issue since June. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted that month to recommend the vaccine for children older than 12 because “the benefits far outweighed the risk,” according to the NYT article.
The NYT used the misstated statistic as background information meant to describe the extent of COVID-19’s effect on U.S. children.
The Oct. 7 correction read:
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.
Other errors from the article were also discussed in the correction placed at the end of the article.
Those errors include incorrectly describing “actions taken by regulators in Sweden and Denmark,” who halted the use of pharmaceutical manufacturer Moderna’s vaccine for children. The NYT reported the two countries had only halted booster shots, not the vaccine entirely.
The article also misstated the timing of a Food and Drug Administration meeting on the authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children. It will be held later this month.
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