Why Is COVID-19 So Racist Against Republicans? What Could It Possibly Beeeeeee?

Is vaccine avoidance or mask/distancing avoidance more deadly? Little girl gif WHY NOT BOTH.

Just to confirm what we've known for a while, another study of partisan differences in death rates from COVID-19 has found that Republicans are having a higher rate of "excess death rates" than Democrats in Ohio and Florida, NBC News reports, explaining that "Excess deaths refers to deaths above what would be anticipated based on historical trends."

The new research, in a working paper for the the National Bureau of Economic Research, follows a June study published in Health Affairs that found higher proportions of COVID deaths in Republican-majority counties nationwide than in Democratic-majority counties (through October 2021 at least).

So why might that be happening, exactly? The obvious answer is that Republicans live in an imaginary bubble where COVID is not a big deal, vaccines and masking are nefarious big-government means of controlling you, and where even though COVID is no big deal, you can treat it with horse dewormer or malaria meds. In fact, we suppose that's so obvious that the researchers didn't feel the need to get into the fallacious beliefs Republicans have about the pandemic, although that's sure to be a rich source of future research in terms of how future public health responses should be designed.

Rather, the question these studies raise for researchers is whether the higher COVID deaths among Republican-leaning folks are primarily because of wider refusal to get vaccinated, or because of wider resistance to wearing masks and maintaining social distance. In yet another example of outrageous media bias, the article doesn't even consider the possibility that the virus was genetically engineered to more aggressively attack the immune systems of people who love America the most, or in areas with the highest number of Alex Jones fans.

The Yale researchers what wrote the most recent paper told NBC News they think the partisan disparity probably results from lower vaccine uptake among Republicans

"In counties where a large share of the population is getting vaccinated, we see a much smaller gap between Republicans and Democrats," said Jacob Wallace, an author of that study and an assistant professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health.

Indeed, his paper found that the partisan gap in the deaths widened from April to December 2021, after all adults became eligible for Covid vaccines. Excess death rates in Florida and Ohio were 153% higher among Republicans than Democrats during that time, the paper showed.

"We really don’t see a big divide until after vaccines became widely available in our two states," Wallace said.

That sounds pretty persuasive to us, although the authors of the June paper believed that noncompliance with masking and social distancing accounted for greater infection rates in Republican areas, and hence a higher resulting death rate. That study suggested that differences in vaccination rates only accounted for about 10 percent of the gap between Democrats and Republicans in death rates.

Co-author Neil Jay Sehgal, a health policy and management prof at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, told NBC News that vaccination rates matter, but are "not the whole story," because

When you have less transmission, you have fewer cases and you have less mortality. And you have less transmission in general by instituting protective policies like mask requirements when we had them, or capacity limits in businesses[.]

Yr Doktor Zoom is not a medical doktor at all, but it seems to me that the stronger claim is for vaccinations, given the widening gap in death rates following the widespread availability of vaccines. But then, maybe a future study would need to account for the vast upsurge in political resistance to both vaccines and masking that we saw during the summer of 2021 — remember how infections were dropping nationwide, but then the Delta variant came along and the biggest masking and vaccination fights started? The near-riots at school board meetings, and Florida Gov. Ron Desantis's threats to punish schools that required masking, didn't really get rolling until August and September of last year. That's when we also saw the Biden administration and many blue states rolling out vaccine mandates, with corresponding rightwing freakouts about liberty and the right to spread disease.

Both studies may be partly limited by the fact that their data sets covers only through October 2021, in the June study, and through December 2021 in the more recent work. That means that while they got much of the data from the Delta surge, they both missed the surge in infections from the Omicron variant, which unlike previous variants infected far more people who had been vaccinated. You might, I'm guessing, find a greater gap in partisan death rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, both because the vaccines prevented more deaths and possibly because, once Omicron began waning in the spring of 2022, everybody everywhere stopped masking like a bunch of dopes. That's the scientific term.

Read More:  COVID Isn't Over, So Get Your Booster, Buster!  t Over, So Get Your Booster, Buster! 

Also too, the NBC story notes that, even this far into the pandemic,roughly 20 percentof the US population hasn't received even a single COVID vaccine, although they're now available for all age groups except babies under 6 months old. That almost made me want to put an N-95 mask on right here at my home office keyboard. In conclusion, there have been far more deaths from this damned disease than there should have, thanks to political fear and paranoia in one party, and as we start staying inside more due to colder weather, it's as important as ever to protect yourself. Get those boosters, folks! 

[ NBC News / NBER study / Health Affairs ]

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