It would earn a right wing politician a Big Tech suspension from social media. But all is fair in the pandemic war on civil liberties. Last week, United States Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor belched up a stinker — what the Washington Post called a “whopper.” During the closely watched high court debate over President Joe Biden’s unilateral vaccination decrees, Sotomayor insisted that the Omicron variant “is as deadly and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as Delta did.”

The left leaning jurist even invoked “the children” to defend Biden’s potentially unconstitutional, government mandated imposition on privately employed adults: “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.” In the words of the Post’s official fact checker, the supreme was “wildly incorrect.” Sotomayor’s calculation was “at least 20 times higher than reality.”

Back in 2001, while addressing the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, the Ivy League luminary mused, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.” As we enter year three of the pandemic panic, many fatigued Americans would hope that a Supreme Court justice with the extraordinary power to shape their Constitutional rights would never reach for sloppy statistics to shore up questionable conclusions.