How New York Times Reporter Apoorva Mandavilli Spreads Misinformation

Dr. Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Franciso, has become an increasingly outspoken critic of the “public health” establishment in the wake of the devastation caused by the COVID‑19 lockdown regimes and their coerced mass vaccination endgame. He also rightly criticizes the mainstream media for their role in spreading government disinformation and censoring dissident views.

Prasad doesn’t pull any punches in a Substack article he published on September 28 titled “Apoorva Mandavilli is a terrible science reporter working at the New York Times”.

That headline immediately caught my attention because I had previously written a whole series of articles dissecting numerous of her deceptive New York Times articles titled “How the New York Times Lies about SARS-CoV-2 Transmission”.

Prasad provides seven illuminating examples of Mandavilli demonstrating her incompetence and bias in favor of lockdowns, masking, school closures, and vaccination of children against COVID-19. I encourage you to read his article for the details, but to briefly summarize (with a few additional observations of my own):

1. Mandavilli ridiculously dismissed the legitimate scientific hypothesis that SARS‑CoV‑2 had a lab origin as “racist”.
2. In an October 2021 article about use of COVID‑19 vaccines in children, she claimed that 900,000 children had been hospitalized for COVID‑19 in the US. The actual estimate was 63,000 (and that’s for COVID‑19-associated hospitalizations, meaning that children tested positive but might have been in the hospital for other reasons).
3. In a May 2022 article about COVID‑19 booster shots for children aged 5 to 11, she claimed that 4,000 children had died from Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (MIS) in the US. But that was the number of children who had been diagnosed, not who died from it.
4. She trivialized the extraordinary harms of school closures by saying that children are “far more resilient than we think” and “will be fine”.
5. In a December 2022 article, she claimed that 3 percent of people with COVID‑19 die from the infection. But the case fatality rate (CFR) in the US at the time was 1 percent. Moreover, without explaining the difference, she compared the CFR for COVID‑19 with the infection fatality rate (IFR) for Ebola, without informing Times readers that the IFR for COVID‑19 was a fraction of a percent (for example, 0.035 percent for people who like me are in their forties).
6. She criticized a pediatrician for reassuring people that the risk to children from COVID‑19 is lower than that of seasonal influenza, even though what he said is true.
7. In a September 2023 article, she relayed an individual’s belief that they became infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 from a nurse wearing a surgical mask as though it were obviously true that this was in fact how the person became infected.

I can add plenty of other examples to Prasad’s list.

I’ll start from a few that I documented in my August 2020 article “How the New York Times Lies about SARS-CoV-2 Transmission: Part 2”. In that piece, I discussed Mandavilli’s March 2020 New York Times article “Infected but Feeling Fine: The Unwitting Coronavirus Spreaders”, in which she was trying to support the whole bogus “silent spreaders” narrative by claiming that studies had proven that asymptomatic transmission was common. To highlight just a few of her deceptions in that article:

• She characterized a study in the New England Journal of Medicine as having shown that a “Patient Z” was an example of “apparently healthy people who were unwitting spreaders.” In fact, the study did not show that this patient had transmitted the virus to anybody.
• She characterized a study of cases aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess as having shown that a fifth or more of transmission is attributable to asymptomatic spread. In fact, the authors of that study only estimated the proportion of asymptomatic infection and did not document any asymptomatic transmission. Directly contradicting the purpose for which Mandavilli was citing their study, the authors explicitly stated that “there is no clear evidence that COVID‑19 asymptomatic persons can transmit SARS‑CoV‑2” and, again, “there is no clear evidence as yet of asymptomatic transmission”.
• Her characterization of those two studies as proving a “high level of covert spread” was thus a bald-faced lie.

I documented more of Mandavilli’s brazen deceptions in my article “How the New York Times Lies about SARS-CoV-2 Transmission: Part 3”, in which I dissected her June 2020 Times propaganda piece “W.H.O. Finally Endorses Masks to Prevent Coronavirus Transmission”. Here are a few key examples:

• She criticized the World Health Organization (WHO) for having “opposed to the public use of masks”, which was untrue. The WHO did not oppose mask use, it just didn’t advocate universal masking of healthy people. Instead, the WHO more sensibly recommended the use of medical masks for people who had symptoms of illness.
• The main message of her article was that the WHO had finally endorsed the policy she was advocating of universal mask use, which was also untrue. In fact, the WHO at that time was rightly maintaining that policies mandating universal masking of healthy people in the community setting were unsupported by scientific evidence.
• In a further attempt to try to discredit the WHO’s positions that were contrary to her own, Mandavilli criticized the WHO based on her mischaracterization that it “did not budge” from its recommendation that health care workers should wear N95 respirators only if involved in aerosol-generating procedures (AGPs) even after a WHO-funded study concluded that N95 masks “are better than surgical masks for health care workers”. In fact, the WHO’s position was that N95 masks could also be worn by health care workers not involved in AGPs if there was a sufficient supply.
• Nor had the WHO ignored the findings of the study it funded. On the contrary, the WHO acknowledged that “N95 or similar respirators might be associated with greater reduction in risk” but cautioned that the study had “important limitations”, including the fact that it was conducted in a setting where AGPs were performed. Thus, the study did not show that N95 masks were more effective than surgical masks in the absence of AGPs as implicitly claimed by Mandavilli.

I documented even more brazen lies from Mandavilli in my article “How the New York Times Lies about SARS-CoV-2 Transmission: Part 4”, in which I exposed her June 2020 propaganda piece “In the W.H.O.’s Coronavirus Stumbles, Some Scientists See a Pattern”. In that article, Mandavilli once again criticized the WHO for maintaining positions that contradicted her own. Here are a few of the deceptions she used to try to maintain her narrative that she was right and the WHO was wrong:

• Mandavilli criticized Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on the COVID‑19 pandemic, for saying that viral transmission by people who were truly asymptomatic, meaning that they were infected but never developed symptoms, appeared to be “very rare”. Mandavilli argued that this was false because studies had estimated that up to 40 percent of transmission was from asymptomatic people. To support that claim, she cited her own “Infected but Feeling Fine” article, in which she presented that 40 percent estimate of presymptomatic, not asymptomatic, transmission.
• Mandavilli knew perfectly well that Dr. Van Kerkhove was talking specifically about asymptomatic transmission and that the 40 percent was an estimate of presymptomatic transmission, and she also clearly understood the distinction between those two terms (indeed, she tried to dismiss it as a “semantic” debate with no practical significance), so her whole basis for claiming that Dr. Van Kerkhove’s statement was untrue was yet another deliberate deception.
• Taking her willful deception even further, Mandavilli claimed that Dr. Van Kerkhove subsequently “walked back” her statement that asymptomatic transmission appeared to be very rare. In fact, the WHO official reiterated that symptomatic transmission appeared to be rare by trying to correct the mischaracterization of her statement by the media as referring to people without symptoms when she was specifically referring to asymptomatic and not presymptomatic transmission.

I again reviewed the New York Times’ deceptions about “silent spread”, including Mandavilli’s horrifically inaccurate and dishonest reporting, in this article:

• The Big Lie about Asymptomatic Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (December 15, 2020)

As an aside, in part four of my series exposing the Times’ lies about transmission, I also showed how the study estimating that 40 percent of transmission occurred during the presymptomatic phase of infection was fundamentally flawed and biased in favor of overestimation. I summarize and expand upon my critique of that study and also discuss how the findings of a SARS‑CoV‑2 human challenge study belie the whole “silent spreaders” narrative in these two articles:

• SARS-CoV-2 Human Challenge Study Belies Presymptomatic Transmission (November 23, 2022)
• New Study Belies Early Claims of ‘Silent Spreaders’ of COVID-19 (September 20, 2023)

The brazenly deceptive reporting of New York Times science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli perfectly illustrates what I mean when I so often say that the mainstream media do policy advocacy, not journalism, and that there is a huge problem of professional propagandists masquerading as journalists.