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Post by the Scribe on Feb 16, 2023 21:10:49 GMT
 The Independent
Almost twice as many Republicans than Democrats died of Covid, study says
news.yahoo.com/almost-twice-many-republicans-democrats-175245935.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
Graig Graziosi
November 17, 2022·2 min read
Virus Outbreak From This Day Forward (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
Nearly twice as many Republicans died from Covid-19 than Democrats did, a new study has found.
www.independent.co.uk/topic/republicans
www.independent.co.uk/topic/covid
www.independent.co.uk/topic/democrats
Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the Covid-19 Pandemic, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, used death records and voter registration records to determine the political breakdown of those who died during the pandemic.
www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30512/w30512.pdf
The initial takeaway is that nearly double the number of Republicans died than Democrats did during the pandemic, and the evidence suggests that vaccine adoption was a key contributing factor to those deaths.
In the early stages of the pandemic, the “excess deaths” between Republicans and Democrats were largely in line. The first major spike appears to have occurred in the winter of 2020, during which time excess deaths between the parties were generally equal.
According to the US Centre for Diesease Control and Prevention, “excess deaths are typically defined as the difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time periods and expected numbers of deaths in the same time periods.”
The Covid-19 vaccines became available around the turn of the year, and took several months to widely distribute. By summer 2021, the study finds that Republican excess deaths had nearly doubled those of Democrats. The disparity in deaths became even more stark during the winter of 2021.
“The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available,” the study says.
Despite the fact that the initial runs of Covid-19 vaccines were developed during Donald Trump’s administration, many Republicans and conservatives refused innoculation. Response to the coronavirus pandemic was politicised, resulting in many Republicans refusing to take the vaccine, either as a result of misinformation spread by conspiracy communities and right-wing media figures and lawmakers, or simply due to a lack of trust in the Biden administration.
Motherboard spoke with one of the authors of the study, Jason Schwartz, and asked if the disparity in deaths could have impacted the outcome of the 2022 midterms.
www.vice.com/en/article/v7vjx8/almost-twice-as-many-republicans-died-from-covid-before-the-midterms-than-democrats?utm_source=reddit.com
“If Republicans are dying in increased numbers relative to their Democratic colleagues in a political climate where there are so many close electoral contests, could that have been the decider in a particular particular race?” he said. “Our study can’t answer that. But it certainly seems plausible given just how stark the differences in vaccination rates have been, among Democrats and Republicans.”
While the researchers can’t make any conclusive remarks about the elections, Mr Schwartz said the link between party and vaccine uptake is much more clear.
“So far, it looks like there really is a signal here, particularly linked to the availability of vaccines,” he said. |
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 16, 2023 21:11:25 GMT
COMMENTS
There are a lot of things I could say here, but I don't want to be insensitive to the dead. Everyone makes their own choices. Some choose to put themselves at risk.
Very sad that good people were so easily lead by politicians giving them false information about Covid. And let's not forget Fox News. They're to blame too. It's inconceivable that someone would essentially risk their lives for they're political beliefs. Politics is important but so is life!
Vaccines protect lives. Kudo to science and technology.
Horse paste didn’t pan out? (IT WORKED FOR ME)
Wonder if it affected the 2022 election results.
Of course they did.
God must dislike Republicans since he allowed twice as many to die as Democrats even though there are more Democrats than Republicans. ; - )
REPLY The older you get, the more conservative people tend to get. Seeing that age is the number one indicator of how dangerous covid is... maybe even you can connect the dots?
REPLY TO REPLY That is not true. I am old and still believe in freedom and democracy. It's an old adage that gets trotted out, but independent studies have found it to be false. Wait and see what happens when republicans finally get their way and destroy social security and medicare. Old people will drop them in droves. They also falsely quote Winston Churchill - ‘If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.’ There is absolutely no evidence he ever said this, and there is not one person who claims to have heard him say it. Churchill himself was a liberal at 35. Yet I hear this repeated again and again. By republicans of course. Empirical evidence would suggest the opposite, look at greene, gohmert, bosart, boebert, foxx, etc. it shouldn't appear to anyone with a brain that any of these people possess one too. I mean, talk about dumb.
So republicans finally have a chance to win on votes cast by dead people
REPLY That wasn't very good.
Take care of yourself. Nobody else will !
Generally younger people lean left and older people lean right... what was the age strata to this 'study'?
REPLY 2020 before vaccinations being democrat vs republican didnt make a difference. It was only after vaccination that they saw a difference. Unless in 2021 all the young generation decided to become democrats
Give it time. Nature votes only for Independents.
Not sure I buy this.
Didn't kill enough Republicans
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 16, 2023 21:22:24 GMT
SCRIBE'S COMMENT
There are SEVERAL studies by different groups coming up with this same result. Conservatism leads to an early death. Interacting with them physically may in turn affect the health of non-cons.
Biden faced an unexpectedly strong opposition to vaccine and mask mandates, led by Republicans, that turned public safety measures endorsed by disease experts into a political and legal battle in the United States.
A conservative-dominated Supreme Court struck down his federal vaccine-or-test mandate for companies, and a Trump-appointed judge struck down his public transportation mask mandate.
Nearly twice as many Republicans died from Covid-19 than Democrats did, a new study has found.
Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the Covid-19 Pandemic, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, used death records and voter registration records to determine the political breakdown of those who died during the pandemic.
And Republicans were the SUPERSPREADERS AMONG US. I have to wonder how many Democrats and Liberals died after exposure to covid from Republiconservatives?
Not only are Republiconservatives their own worst enemy, republiconservatism is the enemy within and a danger to our republic and democracy in general.
Are these the people we want in charge of our nation?
There is something very wrong in the head with these people. Born this way? Or gaslit and brainwashed by conservative media? Conservatism is very much a cult and should be treated as such.
Biden is doing an awesome job by the way on EVERY level! No, he isn't perfect unless you compare him to Trump, Bush or Reagan...then he is. I hope he runs again.
Counterpoint
There have been several problems with the vaccines. While they may be effective in preventing death from covid on one hand at least with some people they are causing health issues in others. Where are those studies? And why have there been no extensive studies on alternatives like ivermectin?
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 17, 2023 5:54:28 GMT
Research
Once COVID Vaccines Were Introduced, More Republicans Died Than Democrats
insights.som.yale.edu/insights/once-covid-vaccines-were-introduced-more-republicans-died-than-democrats
A new Yale study looks at excess deaths by partisan affiliation in two states during the pandemic. Once vaccines were introduced in the spring of 2021, Yale SOM’s Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham and his co-authors found, the rate of deaths among Republicans and Democrats began to diverge.
Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham
Assistant Professor of Finance
Written by Susie Allen
November 15, 2022
Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials have warned that some of us are at higher risk of severe outcomes from the virus, due to factors such as age or preexisting medical conditions.
New research from Yale SOM points to another factor that puts people at greater risk of dying from COVID-19: party affiliation. The study finds that excess deaths during the pandemic were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats in two states, Ohio and Florida. What’s more, the partisan gap in death rates increased significantly after vaccines were introduced.
The research was conducted by Yale SOM’s Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham and Jacob Wallace and Jason L. Schwartz of the Yale School of Public Health.
To Goldsmith-Pinkham, the sharp divergence in excess death rates that emerged in the post-vaccine period “is pretty striking…and the magnitudes are quite large.” While the research doesn’t definitively prove that low vaccine uptake among Republicans explains the mortality gap, “it points to this as a potential mechanism.”
Read the study: “Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic”
www.nber.org/papers/w30512
The question of whether and how much party affiliation affects COVID-19 outcomes has been widely debated among public health scholars and isn’t easy to answer. Some research has found that the death toll from COVID-19 has been higher in red counties than blue ones, but analyzing data at the county level makes it hard to be sure that party alone explains the differences. It’s theoretically possible that other factors about those counties, such as weather or average household size or availability of health care, could be more significant contributors to the death rate than how they voted.
Goldsmith-Pinkham and his co-authors decided to take a different approach that would avoid these pitfalls. They gathered nearly 600,000 Ohio and Florida death records from 2018 to 2021 and matched those records to voter registration data from 2017. This allowed them to determine the party affiliation of each person who died.
Then, they used data from 2019 as a benchmark to determine expected death rates based on age, time of year, location, and party affiliation. In other words, they calculated how many Republicans and Democrats in a given age bracket and a given county would normally die in a given season. Anything above or below that 2019 “normal” was considered an “excess death.”
The excess death framework had two important strengths: It allowed the researchers to study the effects of political party at an individual rather than geographic level, and it provided a built-in means of accounting for differences of age and location.
When the researchers looked at excess deaths before and after the pandemic, the results were sobering. Tragically, but not surprisingly, both Republicans and Democrats experienced a sudden uptick in mortality in during the first year of the pandemic. While excess death rates were slightly higher among Republicans than Democrats, “both are dying at really high rates over this period,” Goldsmith-Pinkham says.
Between March 2020 and March 2021, excess death rates for Republicans were 1.6 percentage points higher than for Democrats. After April 2021, the gap widened to 10.6 percentage points.
twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Between%20March%202020%20and%20March%202021,%20excess%20death%20rates%20for%20Republicans%20were%201.6%20percentage%20points%20higher%20than%20for%20Democrats.%20After%20April%202021,%20the%20gap%20widened%20to%2010.6%20percentage%20points.&url=https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/once-covid-vaccines-were-introduced-more-republicans-died-than-democrats&twitterUsername=YaleInsights
The fates of Republicans and Democrats began to diverge markedly after the introduction of vaccines in April of 2021. Between March 2020 and March 2021, excess death rates for Republicans were 1.6 percentage points higher than for Democrats. After April 2021, the gap widened to 10.6 percentage points.
Does this mean that differing vaccine uptake levels between Republicans and Democrats caused the mortality gap? Goldsmith-Pinkham says this study alone doesn’t prove that’s the case. However, he believes it does offer “pretty good evidence” that vaccines are at least an important part of the story.
And if indeed that’s the case, it suggests that policy makers should be looking at vaccine-promoting interventions specifically targeted at Republicans, Goldsmith-Pinkham says: “It gives you a sense of where you should be looking and who you should be targeting if you want to solve some of these problems.”
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 17, 2023 6:04:08 GMT
Here is Pew's take on the subject.
HEARD ON THE HILL
More Republicans have died of COVID-19. Does that mean the polls are off?
‘It’s a fair question,’ pollsters say
A man dressed as Uncle Sam with a syringe through his head marches with anti-vaccine mandate protesters in Washington on Jan. 23. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)
By Jim Saksa
Posted March 30, 2022 at 5:00am
Doctors and demographers recently noticed another tragic example of how polarization shapes America: The pandemic has killed more people in the nation’s Republican enclaves than its Democratic strongholds. They explain the gap by pointing to Republican resistance to vaccines and the GOP’s more cavalier approach to combating the virus in general.
Those findings suggest many more Republicans — tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands — have died of COVID-19 than Democrats, leading some to wonder with some morbidity what the political impact will be. Will Democrats, facing the normal midterm election headwinds plus high inflation, do surprisingly well in 2022 for the simple, sad fact that there are fewer Republicans?
Or, to put it another way: Can we expect this partisan mortality shift to show up in the polling data?
A partisan divide
In January, the Pew Research Center found that 33 percent of Republicans had not received a vaccine, compared to 10 percent of Democrats. Another Pew survey that month showed a widening mask gap, with Republicans less likely than Democrats (39 percent vs. 79 percent) to say they wore masks inside stores most or all of the time.
www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/02/09/increasing-public-criticism-confusion-over-covid-19-response-in-u-s/#vaccination-rates-among-u-s-adults
www.pewresearch.org/2022/03/03/two-years-into-the-pandemic-americans-inch-closer-to-a-new-normal/
The disparate approaches have come with a partisan death divide. GOP-run states that lifted lockdowns sooner had higher excess death rates than blue states, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed. Florida and Georgia had more than 200 deaths per 100,000, while New York had 112 per 100,000, New Jersey 73 per 100,000 and Massachusetts 50 per 100,000. “Between August and December 2021, Florida experienced more than triple the number of excess deaths (29, 252) as New York (8,786), despite both states having similar population counts (21.7 million and 19.3 million, respectively),” Steven H. Woolf wrote.
jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2790238
The Pew Research Center similarly found that more Americans died in counties that supported Trump than those that backed Biden. Comparing the 20 percent of Americans each living in counties that Trump or Biden took by the highest margins in 2020, Pew found the reddest places suffered nearly 70,000 more deaths from COVID-19 since the pandemic began. And overall, the COVID-19 death rate in all counties Trump won was 326 per 100,000, higher than 258 per 100,000 for Biden.
The mortality disparity between the parties is large enough to potentially swing an election — the 2016 election was decided by just under 80,000 votes spread among Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. So, could it also be enough to throw off the midterm polls?
www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/donald-trump-will-be-president-thanks-to-80000-people-in-three-states/
“It’s a fair question,” said Berwood Yost, director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin and Marshall College, which polls Pennsylvania regularly.
Pennsylvania’s rural, red counties have been losing population for a while now — well before the pandemic — Yost said, while its cities have been growing. “Those smaller rural communities lost sizable population,” Yost said. “But, at the same time, they gained voters.”
Even though deep blue Philadelphia and its suburbs have been growing, the registration figures there haven’t moved much. “Folks in these other areas are just more active and engaged,” Yost said. “And their partisanship has shifted toward Republicans.”
“Despite a population decline of 5.4 percent, voter registration has only declined 2.3 percent in micropolitan areas and has actually increased by 1.5 percent in non core counties, despite a population loss of about 4.5 percent,” Yost wrote recently. “At the same time, the most urban counties, despite a modest population increase of 2.0 percent, [have] seen a decline of 5.0 percent in registered voters.”
www.getrevue.co/profile/fandmpoll/issues/franklin-marshall-college-poll-population-and-voter-registration-changes-in-pa-since-2000-757582
Recent census data for 2020 suggests that the pandemic might have at least temporarily reversed the longstanding trend of large metro areas growing while smaller towns shrink. Some of the changes are attributable to domestic migration — big city dwellers seeking more space and cheaper rent in smaller cities and suburbs. It’s unclear whether that trend will continue as the pandemic subsides and employers encourage workers to come back to the office.
www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/population-estimates-counties-decrease.html
Will the deaths show up in the data?
All the pollsters CQ Roll Call spoke with for this report said that COVID-19 deaths, even though they’ve fallen disproportionately on Republicans, shouldn’t affect their surveys.
“All adults, regardless of voter registration status, are interviewed because we utilize recent Census data of the 18-year-old and over population for weighting purposes. Weighting is a statistical adjustment of the data. Gender, age, education, race, and region are the demographics that are weighted to reflect Census information,” Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in an email. “This process permits not only obtaining full coverage of the target population, but also ensures that subsets within the population are accurately represented within our results.”
The Gallup Poll doesn’t adjust their samples for party identification, said Jeff Jones, a senior editor.
Instead, they use census data, particularly the annual American Community Survey, to make sure their samples look like America in terms of race, gender, region and educational attainment.
www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs
Party identification shifts more rapidly than party registration. Voters will quickly align or distance themselves from a party depending on current events.
“Last year, you would have been in a lot of trouble if you weighted by party because at the beginning of the year the country was a lot more Democratic. At the end of the year, they're a lot more Republican,” Jones said, adding that Gallup stopped election polling a few years ago.
Last year began with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which lowered the GOP’s esteem in voters’ eyes, Jones said, but ended with COVID-19 variants spreading and rising inflation, which hurt Democrats.
Yost’s Pennsylvania polls pull from state voter registration rolls. Yost adjusts his polls by party registration, which as recently as 2008 favored Democrats by about a million but now is nearly evenly split.
“It seems like those Republican areas have been harder hit [by COVID-19] and that might have an effect,” Yost said. “But, demographically, people in more urban areas just don’t get out and vote in the same ways.”
Registration also tends to lag behind larger shifts in voting patterns. Many union Democrats in rust belt towns started voting Republican right after the local factory closed, but they’ve been far slower to update their party registration.
The latest Franklin and Marshall poll surveyed 223 registered Democrats, 200 registered Republicans and 67 independents — a 45 percent, 41 percent, 14 percent split. But when asked for what party they identify with, the respondents split 50 percent Republican, 40 percent Democrat and 6 percent independent, while the rest declined to say.
www.getrevue.co/profile/fandmpoll/issues/franklin-marshall-poll-release-march-2022-1066377
County election boards regularly prune their voter lists of the deceased, so if there are significant changes to the electorate’s composition caused by COVID-19, they should show up in the registration data, Yost said. Pennsylvania removed 84,577 deceased voters from the rolls in 2020.
www.dos.pa.gov/VotingElections/OtherServicesEvents/VotingElectionStatistics/Documents/Annual%20Reports%20on%20Voter%20Registration/2020-Annual-Voter-Registration-Report.pdf
The Keystone State also removes inactive voters (after first sending a notice and giving them a chance to stay on the rolls), which helps catch the death certificates that never made it to the county clerks’ offices and unconfirmed moves out of state. In 2020, Pennsylvania removed 157,690 inactive voters.
There will still be delays and mistakes — no matter what, the data pollsters use will be at least a little old. But that’s just a limitation of polling, Yost said.
“Polls are blunt instruments, not precision instruments,” he said. “They’re useful for understanding context.”
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 17, 2023 6:11:03 GMT
The Intercept THE RIGHT’S ANTI-VAXXERS ARE KILLING REPUBLICANS
theintercept.com/2022/10/10/covid-republican-democrat-deaths/
Since Covid-19 vaccines arrived, the gap in so-called excess deaths between Republicans and Democrats has widened, a new study says.
James RisenJames Risen
October 10 2022, 3:00 a.m.
A NEW STUDY has concluded what many Americans have long suspected: The Covid-19 pandemic has killed more Republicans than Democrats.
In a detailed examination of data from Ohio and Florida, the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that “political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19,” and that significantly more Republicans than Democrats have died from the virus since the introduction of vaccines in early 2021 to protect against the disease.
www.nber.org/papers/w30512
By cross-referencing voter registration data and mortality figures, the study found that “excess death rates” — the number of deaths above pre-pandemic levels — for registered Republicans were significantly higher than for registered Democrats after the introduction of Covid-19 vaccines.
“If these differences in vaccination by political party affiliation persist, then the higher excess death rate among Republicans is likely to continue through the subsequent stages of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the study, which was published in September, concluded.
The study found that death rates from Covid-19 were only slightly higher for Republicans than Democrats during the early days of the pandemic, before vaccines became available. But by the summer of 2021, a few months after vaccines were introduced, “the Republican excess death rate rose to nearly double that of Democrats, and this gap widened further in the winter of 2021.” The sudden increase in the gap between Republican and Democratic death rates “suggests that vaccine take-up likely played an important role,” the study found.
A central narrative of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States has been Republican opposition to public health measures, particularly mandates to wear masks in public and vaccination requirements for employment and access to public places and public travel. That reflected a refusal by many conservatives, following the lead of former President Donald Trump, to take the pandemic seriously, choosing instead to treat Covid-19 as tantamount to the flu.
theintercept.com/2020/10/02/trump-tests-positive-covid-48-hours-mocking-biden-wearing-mask/
theintercept.com/2020/04/28/trump-mocks-mans-mask-white-house-pence-refuses-wear-one-mayo-clinic/
theintercept.com/2020/05/08/coronavirus-trump-kushner-miller-pompeo-barr/
theintercept.com/2020/04/14/trump-pr-stunt-falls-flat-white-house-video-exposes-failure-prepare-pandemic/
theintercept.com/2020/03/25/coronavirus-flu-comparison-trump/
Despite the fact that more than 1 million Americans have died from the virus, many Republican political leaders, particularly in red states, refused to impose stringent public health restrictions during the pandemic, and criticized mask and vaccination mandates. That opposition led many Republicans to deny that the vaccines worked and to refuse to get the shots. In Florida, one of the two states included in the study, Gov. Ron DeSantis transformed himself into a national Republican leader and possible presidential contender by leading the right-wing charge against public health mandates.
theintercept.com/2022/10/06/desantis-hurricane-ian-fox-news-regime-media/
The partisan divide over vaccination developed almost as soon as Covid-19 vaccines became available in early 2021, and it continued to widen. By September 2021, 92 percent of registered Democrats had been vaccinated, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup survey at the time.
www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/10/01/for-covid-19-vaccinations-party-affiliation-matters-more-than-race-and-ethnicity/
But the National Bureau of Economic Research study provides some of the strongest evidence yet that the refusal of many Republicans to get vaccinated has made them much more likely to die from Covid-19. While those who have been vaccinated often still contract the virus, many studies have shown that people who have been vaccinated are much less likely to die from the disease.
doh.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/421-010-CasesInNotFullyVaccinated.pdf
There have been previous efforts to measure the impact on health of the partisan divide over Covid-19 vaccinations. But the National Bureau of Economic Research study offers a more detailed look at death rates in two states among Republicans and Democrats.
www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/briefing/covid-cases-rising-red-america.html
The study tracked 577,659 people who died in Ohio and Florida at age 25 or older between January 2018 and December 2021. It then linked those people to their 2017 Ohio and Florida voting records.
Between March 2020 and March 2021, excess death rates for Republicans in Ohio and Florida were 1.6 percentage points higher than for Democrats; but from April 2021 to December 2021 — after vaccines became widely available — the gap widened to 10.6 percentage points. The study found that the largest gaps in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats came in Ohio and Florida counties with low vaccination rates. By using county-level vaccination rates in Ohio and Florida, “we find evidence that vaccination contributes to explaining differences in excess deaths by political party affiliation, even after controlling for location and age differences,” the study said.
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 17, 2023 6:23:04 GMT
UNTANGLING DISINFORMATION
Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame
www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate
Updated December 5, 202110:27 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
listen
ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2021/12/20211206_me_pro_trump_counties_covid.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1128&aggIds=973275370&d=238&p=3&story=1059828993&dl=1&sc=siteplayer&size=3813504&dl=1&aw_0_1st.playerid=siteplayer
DANIEL WOOD
GEOFF BRUMFIEL
People protest a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers on Oct. 28 in New York City. Polling, vaccination and mortality data all suggest that Republicans lag far behind in vaccination and are suffering the worst consequences as a result.
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who live in areas that went for now-President Biden. That's according to a new analysis by NPR that examines how political polarization and misinformation are driving a significant share of the deaths in the pandemic.
NPR looked at deaths per 100,000 people in roughly 3,000 counties across the U.S. from May 2021, the point at which vaccinations widely became available. People living in counties that went 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.73 times the death rates of those that went for Biden. Counties with an even higher share of the vote for Trump saw higher COVID-19 mortality rates.
In October, the reddest tenth of the country saw death rates that were six times higher than the bluest tenth, according to Charles Gaba, an independent health care analyst who's been tracking partisanship trends during the pandemic and helped to review NPR's methodology. Those numbers have dropped slightly in recent weeks, Gaba says: "It's back down to around 5.5 times higher."
acasignups.net/21/12/02/weekly-update-covid19-casedeath-rates-county-partisan-lean-vaccination-rate
Counties that went heavily for Donald Trump have seen much lower vaccination rates and much higher death rates from COVID
The trend was robust, even when controlling for age, which is the primary demographic risk of COVID-19 mortality. The data also reveal a major contributing factor to the death rate difference: The higher the vote share for Trump, the lower the vaccination rate.
The analysis only looked at the geographic location of COVID-19 deaths. The exact political views of each person taken by the disease remains unknowable. But the strength of the association, combined with polling information about vaccination, strongly suggests that Republicans are being disproportionately affected.
Inside the growing alliance between anti-vaccine activists and pro-Trump Republicans
UNTANGLING DISINFORMATION
www.npr.org/2021/12/06/1057344561/anti-vaccine-activists-political-conference-trump-republicans
The U.S. Surgeon General Is Calling COVID-19 Misinformation An 'Urgent Threat'
SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS
www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/07/15/1016013826/the-u-s-surgeon-general-is-calling-covid-19-misinformation-an-urgent-threat
Recent polling shows that partisanship is now this single strongest identifying predictor of whether someone is vaccinated. Polling also shows that mistrust in official sources of information and exposure to misinformation, about both COVID-19 and the vaccines, run high among Republicans.
"An unvaccinated person is three times as likely to lean Republican as they are to lean Democrat," says Liz Hamel, vice president of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy think tank that tracks attitudes toward vaccination. Political affiliation is now the strongest indicator of whether someone is vaccinated, she says: "If I wanted to guess if somebody was vaccinated or not and I could only know one thing about them, I would probably ask what their party affiliation is."
It was not always this way. Earlier in the pandemic, many different groups expressed hesitancy toward getting vaccinated. African Americans, younger Americans and rural Americans all had significant portions of their demographic that resisted vaccination. But over time, the vaccination rates in those demographics have risen, while the rate of Republican vaccination against COVID-19 has flatlined at just 59%, according to the latest numbers from Kaiser. By comparison, 91% of Democrats are vaccinated.
Republicans make up a majority of unvaccinated people in the U.S.
Since April, Democrats and independents have made up a declining share of the unvaccinated population, as more of those groups have become vaccinated. Meanwhile, the Republican share of the unvaccinated population has grown.
Being unvaccinated increases the risk of death from COVID-19 dramatically, according to the CDC. The vast majority of deaths since May, around 150,000, have occurred among the unvaccinated, says Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
While vaccine hesitancy exists in many different groups, Hotez suspects that the deaths are "overwhelmingly" concentrated in more politically conservative communities. "How does this make sense at any level?" he asks.
More than 90% of Republicans surveyed believe or are unsure about at least one false statement about COVID-19
The consequences for individuals are real. Mark Valentine still remembers when his brother called him to tell him he had contracted coronavirus. Valentine is a trial consultant in North Carolina. His brother Phil, 61, was a well-known conservative talk show host in Nashville, Tenn., who often expressed skepticism about vaccination.
Conservative talk radio host Phil Valentine (right), pictured with his brother, Mark (second from left). Phil had been skeptical about COVID and the COVID vaccines, sometimes mocking them on his talk show. Earlier this year, he contracted the virus and died.
Courtesy of Mark Valentine
Neither brother was vaccinated, and neither one was particularly worried about Phil's positive result. His brother said he was trying several alternative therapies commonly promoted in conservative circles. "He said, 'I've got the ivermectin, I started it this morning, and I don't think it's going to be a big deal,' " Mark Valentine recalls. "And frankly I didn't think about it anymore."
But a week later, Mark said he got a call from his brother's wife saying that the two were going to the hospital. "Before I knew it, he was in there and I couldn't get to him, couldn't talk to him," Valentine recalls. "His situation took a nosedive like you can't believe."
Phil Valentine died in August about five weeks after he announced he had tested positive for COVID-19.
Misinformation appears to be a major factor in the lagging vaccination rates. The Kaiser Family Foundation's polling shows Republicans are far more likely to believe false statements about COVID-19 and vaccines. A full 94% of Republicans think one or more false statements about COVID-19 and vaccines might be true, and 46% believe four or more statements might be true. By contrast, only 14% of Democrats believe four or more false statements about the disease.
More than 90% of Republicans surveyed believe or are unsure about at least one false statement about COVID-19
Members of all parties believe that some amount of false statements about COVID-19 are true, but those shares are greatest among Republicans and independents.
Belief in multiple false statements highly correlates with vaccination status, Hamel says. "If you believe that the vaccines can damage your fertility, that they contain a microchip and that the government is inflating the number of COVID-19 deaths, you're going to think really differently about whether to get vaccinated."
The most widely believed false statement was that 'the government is exaggerating' the number of COVID-19 deaths
Perhaps the most pernicious pieces of misinformation have to do with the perceived severity of COVID-19 itself. The most widely believed false statement was: "The government is exaggerating the number of COVID-19 deaths."
Hamel says that underestimating the severity of COVID-19 appears to be a major reason why Republicans in particular have fallen behind in vaccination: "We've seen lower levels of personal worry among Republicans who remain unvaccinated," she says. "That's a real contrast with what we saw in communities of color, where there was a high level of worry about getting sick."
While COVID still rages, anti-vaccine activists will gather for a big conference
UNTANGLING DISINFORMATION
www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1048162253/while-covid-still-rages-anti-vaccine-activists-will-gather-for-a-big-conference
How ivermectin became the new focus of the anti-vaccine movement
SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS
www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/09/19/1038369557/ivermectin-anti-vaccine-movement-culture-warsent
Complacency around the risks of contracting COVID-19 certainly seemed to be a major reason why the Valentine brothers avoided vaccination. While not conspiracy theorists, they were staunch Trump supporters. The arrival of coronavirus just ahead of the presidential election of 2020 seemed like "the most fortuitous pandemic in the history of the world" for the Democratic Party, recalls Mark.
Despite the media coverage, Phil Valentine didn't believe COVID-19 was serious as long as you were healthy: "He said, 'The likelihood of me getting it is low. In the unlikely event that I do get it, the likelihood that I will survive it is 99-plus %,' " Mark Valentine recalls.
Vaccine researcher Peter Hotez is deeply troubled by the current state of affairs. A winter surge in COVID-19 cases is brewing, and the newly discovered omicron variant has the potential to make things far worse.
Facebook's Most Viewed Article In Early 2021 Raised Doubt About COVID Vaccine
UNTANGLING DISINFORMATION
www.npr.org/2021/08/21/1030038616/facebooks-most-viewed-article-in-early-2021-raised-doubt-about-covid-vaccine
The Life Cycle Of A COVID-19 Vaccine Lie
SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS
www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/07/20/1016912079/the-life-cycle-of-a-covid-19-vaccine-lie
He thinks the elements of the Republican Party that are endorsing anti-vaccine ideas need to take a big step back. "I'm not trying to change Republican thinking or far-right thinking," he says. "I'm trying to say: 'The anti-science doesn't belong; it doesn't fit. ... Just stop it and save lives.' ''
Before his illness, Phil Valentine had sometimes promoted unproven alternative therapies and taken a mocking tone toward vaccination. As his situation deteriorated, Mark says the talk show host realized he needed to encourage his listeners to get vaccinated. Phil told his brother, "'My fear is that because I didn't get it, other folks may not get it," Mark Valentine recalls. The family put out a statement in support of vaccination, and Mark went on to his brother's talk show to encourage listeners to take the shot.
He also headed to his local Walmart to get vaccinated. "The guy comes out; he said, 'Do you have any questions or concerns?' " Mark Valentine recalls. "I said, 'Hell yeah, I've got both, but do it anyway.' "
Methodology
Vaccination rate data are the rate of vaccination among all people 18 years of age or older, as of Nov. 30. They are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
data.cdc.gov/Vaccinations/COVID-19-Vaccinations-in-the-United-States-County/8xkx-amqh
COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 residents are calculated by dividing the deaths from COVID-19 in a county since May 1 by the county's population. County population data come from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 decennial census. May 1 was chosen as the start date of our analysis because that is roughly the time when vaccines became universally available to adults ages 18 and older. COVID-19 death data is collected by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University and is current as of Nov. 30. COVID-19 death data for Florida and Utah are from the May 2 and December 1 editions of the COVID-19 Community Profile Report, produced by the White House COVID-19 Team.
data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=population%20by%20county%20decennial%20census&tid=DECENNIALPL2020.P1
github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19
beta.healthdata.gov/Health/COVID-19-Community-Profile-Report/gqxm-d9w9
2020 election result data are from MIT Election Data and Science Lab.
dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/VOQCHQ
Alaska does not report election results by county-equivalent area, so it is excluded from the analysis. Nebraska is excluded from the analysis because it does not report county-level COVID-19 statistics. Hawaii is excluded because it does not report county-level vaccine data. Some counties that have reported no COVID-19 deaths since May 1 may have stopped reporting. These counties generally have very small populations and have a negligible impact on the weighted averages. Erring on the side of caution, we include all data unless it is known that they are in error.
All averages are weighted by county population. The overall average represents the average of the 3,011 counties included in the analysis.
Thanks to Emily Gurley, Professor of the Practice and Emily Pond, Research Data Analyst, both of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for discussions about our methodology.
NPR's Huo Jingnan contributed to this story.
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