Ted Lieu is really committed to playing his part as an insufferable leftwing hack. Despite previously proclaiming that the government could not be involved in the censorship of speech by private companies, he immediately dismissed the revelation that the FBI was doing just that in regard to Twitter.
Now, he’s doubling down after another Twitter Files drop showed government interference regarding the dissemination of information about COVID-19. As RedState reported, the corruption was far-reaching, targeting medical professionals for making objectively true statements that strayed from the official White House narrative on things like the coronavirus vaccines, masks, and natural immunity
In a now-deleted tweet, Lieu responded to David Zweig, who put out the most recent Twitter Files, and suggested he was pushing misinformation. Here’s what that looked like.
Really, how vapid must one be to actually believe that the leading cause of death for children is COVID-19? That’s one of the most absurd contentions of the entire pandemic, not born out by a bit of evidence. Children have long been largely immune to the virus, and pediatric deaths from it don’t even rival those from the regular flu. That the study Lieu linked suggested otherwise only proves that trusting everything “the science” tells us is a recipe for disaster.
Besides, that study was debunked and ultimately changed, something Elon Musk helped point out.
In the CDC ACIP meeting on June 17 to discuss childhood Covid vaccines, a table was presented showing Covid was a leading cause of death in US children as part of a slide deck on the epidemiology of Covid-19 in children and adolescents by Dr. Katherine Fleming-Dutra. The source was a pre-print written by a group of academics from the UK, including Dr. Seth Flaxman and Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, who is well-known on Twitter for her strong views on Covid. I later learned that a very similar slide was also presented at the beginning of the FDA VRBPAC meeting earlier in the week, as were other slides citing this “top 5 cause of death” claim.
The slide was shared on Twitter by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina (“Your Local Epidemiologist”), and retweeted by many influential people including Jerome Adams, Julia Raifman (tweet now deleted), Gregg Gonsalves, and Leana Wen. Only problem? It’s completely and utterly false. The pre-print it’s based on includes significant errors that invalidate the results. And the slide makes additional errors on top of the pre-print. It’s really disturbing that data this poor made its way into the meetings to discuss childhood Covid, and that it took me less that a few minutes to find a major flaw (and then I found many more as I looked deeper).
The fact check goes on to expose, in detail, why the original claim of COVID-19 being a leading cause of death for children is false. The study (which was done by a group in the UK) cherry-picked time periods, ignored the difference between dying with COVID and dying from it, and double-counted deaths over a 26-month cumulative period (while comparing to other causes of annualized deaths only in 2019).
Here’s the thing, though. Lieu shouldn’t have needed to be shown that fact check. If he weren’t so busy pushing ridiculous leftwing narratives, which is what the entire Twitter Files saga is about, he’d have used common sense to recognize what he was spreading was wrong, and that includes his claim about natural immunity. There is no definitive study that says natural immunity only lasts a few months and there is plenty of data that suggests it lasts much longer.
RedState’s own Jennifer Van Laar offered this response.
The idea that everyone, including children, should rush out and get vaccinated and boosted sans hard data that they are at high risk is actually dangerous in and of itself. There are so many different scenarios to consider, and at the end of the day, that discussion should be left between the person and their doctor. Lieu is pushing his talking points purely for political reasons, not to inform people with relevant data. He should stay in lane if he’s not going to do the most basic research before popping off, though I’m not sure exactly what that is.
