George Eaton, who writes for the New Statesman in the UK, tweeted that there has been a 10,000% increase in Venezuela’s’ infant mortality because of its economic crisis. You have to question the sanity, not just the intelligence, of somebody willing to make this claim.
Here are UNICEF figures for Venezuela’s infant mortality rate in recent years. Venezuela’s economic crisis began in November of 2014 when oil prices, on which Venezuela’s economy depends, rapidly collapsed. The numbers below are deaths per 1000 live births.
2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 |
13.8 | 13.5 | 13.2 | 12.9 |
You can download the data here.
A 10,000% increase would mean that Venezuela’s infant mortality rate is now 1303 deaths per 1000 live births. In other words, somehow, over 100% of Venezuelan infants die before their first birthday according to George Eaton. Incidentally, unless Eaton is prepared to claim that there has also been an absolutely staggering increase in the number of Venezuelan births that nobody in the world has detected, then we needn’t worry about the distinction between “infant mortality” and the “infant mortality rate” – that’s generously assuming that Eaton understands the distinction.
Let’s examine Eaton’s lunacy another way.
In West and Central Africa, the region with the highest infant mortality rate in the world, the rate is 66.3 deaths per thousand live births. George Eaton believes it is actually 20 times worse in Venezuela.
Is there anything negative that Eaton wouldn’t believe about a country targeted for regime change by the Unites States and its allies?
Incidentally, Eaton based his claim off an article by Ricardo Hausmann, a guy who for years pushed a conspiracy theory that the 2004 recall referendum (which Hugo Chavez won by 20 points!) was actually won by the opposition. Hausmann also publicly mused that Venezuela may be on the brink of defaulting on its debt in early September of 2014 when oil prices were over $90 per barrel. A few month later, oil prices collapsed by half and there was no default.
On June 8, Labour’s performance under Jeremy Corbyn in the UK general election exposed the entire UK media class as incompetent, biased and dishonest. They can’t be trusted about their own country but are dangerously positioned to mislead the public about the rest of the world.
UPDATE Sep 1, 2017:
I should note that, three weeks days later, Eaton still hasn’t deleted the tweet. I doubt he ever will given that “professional journalists” have zero standards for accuracy when it comes to governments the US wants to overthrow.
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