The GOP. The party that brands itself as the party that supports life intentionally misinforms its Republican constituents, causing many deaths. The numbers don’t lie.
GOP killing their Republican constituents
Republicans are killing their own. Their politicians, from the top, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to their news media, like Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax, to their pundits, are lying to their constituents.
DeSantis recently announced that Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo would lead the Public Health Integrity Committee to assess federal health decisions, recommendations, and guidance related to public health care. This comes following the governor’s criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of vaccine mandates and his criticism of what he called “propaganda” and vaccine side effect misinformation. DeSantis has filed a petition to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate “crimes and wrongs” in Florida related to the COVID-19 vaccines and enforcement methods.
DeSantis is ignoring factual data that proves the success of COVID vaccines. He must pay a price for the deaths he is causing.
As shown in a recent report by Medical Economics, GOP misinformation is getting Republicans killed.
After COVID-19 vaccines were available, Republicans had higher excess death rates than Democrats, with differences “concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates.”
The findings were part of a study, “Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” published this fall by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Schwartz and Yale coauthors Jacob Wallace, PhD, assistant professor of public health, and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, PhD, assistant professor of finance, examined 2017 voter registration records from Ohio and Florida, along with 577,659 deaths of people who died aged 25 years or older from January 2018 to December 2021.
“Excess deaths” – the percent increase in deaths above expected deaths due to seasonality, geographic location, political party affiliation and age – were similar for Republicans and Democrats in 2018 and early 2020. Both groups had a similar large spike in excess death in winter 2020-2021.
“However, in the summer of 2021 – after vaccines were widely available – the Republican excess death rate rose to nearly double that of Democrats, and this gap widened further in the winter of 2021,” the study said.
From March 2020 to December 2021, a time overlapping with the COVID-19 pandemic, average excess death rates were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats. That grew to a 95% difference when measured from March 2020 to March 2021, and a 153% difference after April 5, 2021, “when all adults were eligible for COVID-19 vaccines in Florida and Ohio,” the study said.
“This sharp contrast in the excess death rate gap before and after vaccines were available suggests that vaccine take-up likely played an important role,” the study said. Factoring in county-level vaccination rates, areas with larger vaccination rates “saw much smaller excess death rate gaps between Republicans and Democrats (even after adjusting for county and age differences).”
One hopes that enough thinking Republicans will care enough about humanity over ideology to overcome another potential winter COVID catastrophe.