Liberal Supreme Court justices spread COVID-19 misinformation

Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor confirmed during Friday’s oral arguments that they are firmly in favor of President Joe Biden’s private sector vaccine mandate. However, the facts they relied upon to make their case were flat-out wrong.

Kagan began by claiming “the best way” to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is “for people to get vaccinated,” and the “second best way” is to “wear masks.” Neither claim is true. While the vaccines appear to slow the spread of COVID-19 and reduce the chance of death, there is absolutely no evidence that they prevent transmission, especially not against the much more contagious omicron variant.

The cloth masks mandated in different parts of the country don’t prevent the spread of the virus either, as several public health experts have recently admitted.

“Cloth masks aren’t going to provide a lot of protection. That’s the bottom line. This is an airborne illness. We now understand that, and a cloth mask is not going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission. It could protect better through droplet transmission, something like the flu, but not something like this coronavirus,” the Food and Drug Administration’s former Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said last week.

Breyer continued to spread misinformation by falsely claiming that 750 million people — there are only 330 million people living in the United States — tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday. That would mean every single one of us tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday twice.

Breyer then implied, like Kagan before him, that Biden’s vaccine mandate would bring the number of daily cases down to zero. Again, this is not true. Fully vaccinated and boosted adults are testing positive for COVID-19 at about the same rate as unvaccinated people, which means everyone is going to get the virus one way or the other, vaccinated or unvaccinated.

But the worst falsehoods by far came from Sotomayor, who claimed the omicron variant is just as deadly as the delta variant was and that more than 100,000 children have been hospitalized by COVID-19, with “many” on ventilators. Where in the world is Sotomayor getting her news? Every single public health expert who has weighed in on this virus has acknowledged that omicron is far less severe than delta was, even though omicron is more contagious.

Regarding her claim about children, I have absolutely no idea where she’s getting that 100,000 figure. The current national pediatric COVID-19 census from the Department of Health and Human Services shows 3,342 children with COVID-19 in hospitals. And, as Anthony Fauci admitted last week, there is a huge difference between children hospitalized by COVID-19 and those hospitalized with COVID-19. The vast majority of pediatric cases are from children hospitalized with COVID-19, meaning they were hospitalized by something else first and happened to test positive at about that same time.

“If you look at the children [who] are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID,” Fauci said last week. “What we mean by that is that if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID, and they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual, when in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that.”

It is impossible to take seriously the arguments from people who can’t be bothered to get their facts straight first. That especially applies to Supreme Court justices, who are charged with making important legal decisions that affect every single one of us. Kagan, Breyer, and Sotomayor proved on Friday that they either don’t care about the facts or they just don’t care to be taken seriously.