People who identify with the political right are less likely to get a vaccine.
Ted S. Warren/APResidents of counties that went for Donald Trump in the last presidential election are more likely to die from carbon dioxide than residents of areas that went for President Biden. According to a new analysis from NPR, how partisanship and misinformation are shaping the epidemic.
The point at which most Americans could find a vaccine was examined by NPR. The death rate for people living in counties that voted for Trump was 2.26 times higher than the death rate for people who voted for Biden. The mortality rates in counties with a higher share of Trump votes were higher.
The loss of life is preventable. According to a recent analysis by Brown University, nearly 320,000 lives could have been saved if more people had chosen to get vaccinations. There is a partisan split in how preventable deaths are distributed. The states that went most heavily for Trump were West Virginia and Wyoming, while the states that voted for Biden were Massachusetts and Vermont.
How you vote shouldn't be used to determine whether you die of carbon dioxide, says an epidemiologist at the Brown University School of Public Health. The immediate reason for the divide is simple: Trump-leaning counties have lower vaccination rates than those that went for Biden. The gap was 21 points, with 81% of adults in heavily-Biden counties being vaccine free compared to 60% of adults in counties that went for Trump.
The unvaccinated are 10 times more likely to die from a COVID-19 infection than the vaccine-vaccinated.
Nuzzo says that the partisan divide in deaths is one of the major failures of public health messaging. Many people do not have one.
Anti-vaccine advocates feed into conspiracy theories on the political right on social media. She says that it is hard for people to find the facts if they are of a political persuasion.
Liz Hamel is the director of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-partisan think tank. Democrats are more likely to say they are vaccine free than Republicans. 42% of Republicans say they will definitely not get the vaccine.
Belief in misinformation is correlated with being unvaccinated. Kaiser looked at several pieces of misinformation, such as the idea that the government is exaggerating the severity of the Pandemic, or that the vaccines contain a chip. A survey by Kaiser found that 98% of Republicans believed false statements about the vaccine.
There was an indication that people who trusted conservative news media sources were more likely to believe misinformation than people who trusted more mainstream news sources.
The death gap between the pro-Trump and pro-Biden counties decreased slightly over the winter.
William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, said that it was most likely down to the Omicron variant. Hanage says that Omicron is more effective at avoiding masks than before.
The variant's high transmissibility has allowed Omicron to reach communities in more Democrat-leaning parts of the country that were previously able to protect themselves. Nuzzo thinks that the narrowing gap is due to older Americans who are not getting a booster shot even if they are eligible. According to recent Kaiser data, 30% of Americans 65 and older remain unboosted.
The gap in deaths by political affiliation is expected to shrink. The chances of death from subsequent bouts with COVID will decrease as more Americans survive infections. New people are being born every day, and others are aging into different risk categories. She warns that the fact that we haven't gotten to the bottom of this hesitation is setting us up for bigger problems.
Hanage thinks that if a group of politicians are willing to take vaccines and turn them into a wedge issue for political gain, there will be even deeper problems.
There is a methodology.
The total cumulative deaths from COVID-19 are divided by the number of residents in the county. Population data comes from the US Census Bureau.
The line chart shows the cumulative deaths per 100,000 residents since March 1, 2020 in three groups: counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2020, counties that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and the overall average. The current death data is collected by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
The chart shows deaths per 100,000 residents. The start date of our analysis was May 1, 2021. The CDC Community Profile Report, which was produced by the White House COVID-19 Team, contained death data from Utah, Ohio and Missouri.
The rate of full vaccination among people 18 years of age or older was recorded on May 18, 2022. They are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The MIT Election Data and Science Lab has 2020 election result data.
All analyses excluded Nebraska, Hawaii and Alaska due to insufficient data.
The average is weighted by the population. This analysis uses a total of 3014 counties.
Thanks to Beth Blauer from the Centers for Civic Impact, we were able to discuss our methodology.
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