This article by Fox News can be found by searching for articles on the coronavirus, as well as frequenting the Fox News website. Personally, I looked up articles on google about the outbreak, and this one seemed important to me to look into. The claim that “men appear to be more vulnerable to the coronavirus” is something that could seem inflammatory at first, and certainly does have some caveats to its truth. But, at the essence of this article, there is a truth.
The first link over the first word “Scientists” that the report embedded sent the reader to the general Fox News Health page, implying that the scientists are only people who write Fox News Health articles. That link, and the link embedded on the word coronavirus that leads to other articles on the topic, are less relevant than the links further into the article. One links to a study done into the coronavirus which supports the claim of a medical writer, Anjana Ahuja. This leads us to an article written by said journalist in the Financial Times, where she describes a “discrepancy” in the data, where towards the beginning of the outbreak there were 67 male patients and 32 female patients. It then goes on to describe that their immune systems are theorized to be weaker in men, especially in the case of coronaviruses (a type of virus, not the named coronavirus recently plaguing Wuhan).
Reading this critically is an important tool, because the men more likely to be at risk are older men with pre-existing conditions. Obviously, anyone with a pre-existing condition being sick already is more at risk to a respiratory disease like the coronavirus. The claim that “men are more vulnerable to the coronavirus” is situated in the assumption that men’s immune systems are, in general, weaker than women’s. Therefore, they are more vulnerable to just about any disease, not just the coronavirus. For the sake of profit, though, this article was targeted towards the current outbreak across all news outlets. As the virus continues to spread, more articles like this one will pop up.
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