Americans are done with COVID, but it isn't done with us.
Republicans are dying disproportionately to Democrats.
A recent study by Yale researchers published by the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at "excess deaths." We can expect a certain number of births and deaths every day. We have a baseline for each.
Causation is not proven. Only correlation. Maybe the disparate vaccination rate wasn't responsible for the disparate death rate. Maybe it was something else. Maybe watching Fox News causes heart attacks or more slips in the bathtub. But the numbers and the timing suggest that the difference in excess deaths is the difference in vaccination rates.
In the period before vaccines were available in the spring of 2021 there were different rules and cultural norms among Democratic and Republican areas as regards mask-wearing and social distancing. Apparently that did not matter much. The excess death rates were the same for Democratic and Republican areas. I observed this first hand. In 2020 people masked-up in stores in the Democratic city of Ashland. Few people did so in stores in the heavily-Trump area near my farm. Maybe masks and other COVID protocols regarding sanitation and distancing don't matter as much as we thought.
Vaccinations, though, do seem to matter. Big differences in excess deaths showed up after vaccines were available. Here is a graph of the data by county. Higher vaccination rate, fewer deaths. 
Here below is a graph of the excess deaths, looking at the individual voter registration of the deceased in Ohio and Florida. As one moves through time from left to right, the upper graph shows the baseline deaths in the pre-COVID era, then the general rise in deaths as COVID spread with a peak around the 2020 election and the winter of 2021 as the first vaccines began rolling out. By the end of 2021 when everyone who wanted a vaccine had easy opportunity to get one, a clear divergence was evident. Fewer Republicans were getting vaccinated than Democrats, and they had significantly more excess deaths.
More vaccinations means fewer excess deaths:
Democratic politicians who were on the leading edge of enforcing masking, school closures, and social distancing have paid a significant political price. Americans grew tired of COVID protocols before some Democratic governors removed COVID protocols. However, there is one arrow in the quiver of public health that appears to have dramatic influence on death rates, at very little of the day-to-day bother of masking: Vaccinations. The vaccinated may well get COVID and spread it, but they are more likely to survive it. Vaccinations are free.
I have heard objections to getting boosters. People complain to me they already got vaccinated once or twice and they are tired of it. They define needing boosters as proof that there is some deficiency with vaccines. There is a messaging problem and it is getting worse. The new multi-variant booster is under-subscribed. A more useful frame for policymakers is to liken vaccinations to an automobile oil change or a tooth cleaning. Vaccinations are a maintenance item.
A PDF of the study is here: Yale Researchers
A readable news story summarizes the study: Ohio Capital Journal.
Here is another readable news story from Utah: Deseret News
15 comments:
The unvaccinated deserve a Darwin Award, given to those who help chlorinate our gene pool by removing their DNA from it. I feel sorry for the poor doctors and nursed who have to care for them. How do you explain to someone that he's dying of something he thought was a hoax?
A variation on an old theme: “give me liberty or give me death.“ Covid infections are up in Europe and there is increased waste water detection in the north east US. NPR, 10/7. Winter is coming…
My circle of friends have all had 3 boosters, flu shots, shingles series, and pneumonia shots.I got my colonoscopy two days ago and am good for 10 years now. I’m going to die, but why not increase the odds of getting a few extra good years? I don’t view that as a political statement, rather my life is pretty good and want to keep it going.
I was reading an article on life expectancy which suggested getting an annual flu shot was more important than whether the person was obese.
We need boosters because the Covid virus continues to mutate, and the new forms of it can get past the immunity from the previous vaccines. In that way, it’s the same situation as flu; every year there are new versions of the flu virus.
The problem is that onece public trust in institutions has eroded, many people won’t believe even simple things like this. The initial lies from the CDC about whether we should use masks and what kind we should use contributed enormously to this level of distrust.
This makes perfect sense.
I've advocated for mandated vaccination. This data is a vindication of that. Sure, you are free, but your freedom is constrained by your imposition on mine. Your decision to risk COVID hospitalization is paid for by my health insurance premium. Universal healthcare would strengthen the case for mandated preventative care, including vaccinations, screenings, etc. If you opt out YOU PAY ME.
No brainer, IMV.
What contributed the most to vaccine distrust was all the anti-vaccine disinformation spewed by right-wing media, and all the people clueless enough to swallow it. No, the shots aren't going to make you magnetic or inject you with a microchip.
As I recall, Senator Jeff Golden promoted the idea that it's okay to not vaccinate children if you don't want to. That was when the issue was whether children who hadn't been vaccinated against measles should attend Ashland public schools. That was then. What about now, candidate Golden? And what about mandatory COVID vaccination?
Research on acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine shows that vaccine acceptance depends on how much the people of a particular country trust the government.
link
Government officials lying about mask efficacy doesn’t help.
Michael Trigoboff said the government officials "lied" about mask efficacy. Lied is a harsh word, but no doubt something MT believes, and it is consistent with his questioning the amount of trust one has in the government.
My own sense is that under both Trump and Biden, the CDC and other public health authorities were feeling their way. It was not clear how contagious COVID was, how it was spread, how sick people got, who was at highest risk. For a while the only tool they had was masking and separation, so they used it. It was complicated by the non-availability of masks, including for health care people. Amid this uncertainty we needed health care people to show up for work and neither the government nor those workers knew if they were walking into the Twin Towers to death to themselves and their families, or if it was just a bad case of the flu.
Easy for people with hindsight to say should-a, should-a, they guessed and were sort of right but sort of wrong and therefore they lied because they maybe thought that masks were not as useful as they were made out to be. Anybody in any profession that involves anticipating the future amid multiple unknowns can be accused of lying. I had a bad client in my brokerage career who thought that anytime a stock recommendation went down that I must have lied to benefit myself or someone else. And if I didn't sell a winner at the top, I must have lied to benefit someone other than him. I don't consider him savvy. I think he was deeply suspicious and hostile and he used language like "lie" to explain less than ideal outcomes. I know he was profoundly unhappy all the time. Bitter. He finally left to go elsewhere, sued me on the way out, and was slam-dunk 100% denied by the arbitrator, who he then said was stupid and corrupt.
My view of the CDC et al. is more charitable, but maybe I am biased by having spent 30 years trying to deal with Monday Morning quarterbacks.
Peter Sage
Anonymous wrote, "As I recall, Senator Jeff Golden promoted the idea that it's okay to not vaccinate children if you don't want to. That was when the issue was whether children who hadn't been vaccinated against measles should attend Ashland public schools." I'm fairly sure that what he is recalling occurred after measles broke out in several places in the U.S., including southern Washington State and a fairly small number of cases across the river in Oregon. Bills were filed in the legislative session shortly thereafter calling for an end to the "philosophical" exemption to mandatory vaccination of children entering school. As a proponent of mandatory vaccination, I had a discussion with Golden about his stand. It was as follows (which contradicts Anonymous' assertion): Golden wanted to amend the bill to restrict the end of the philosophic objection to the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine, which the measles outbreak called for. The schedule of mandatory vaccinations has expanded significantly over the years, and Golden told me that he had doubts about requiring parents to have their children get all of them. The upshot of the legislation was that, as a way of effecting the return of the 12 Republican senators who had staged a walkout and thus prevented the senate from having a quorum, the vaccination bill and a gun control bill were taken off the senate's agenda. [Outrageously, those senators broke faith and walked out again to prevent the climate control legislation to pass.]
If I remember correctly, early on in Covid Fauci said we didn’t need to wear masks. He later admitted that he said that because he wanted to preserve the mask supply for healthcare workers. It may have been a well-intentioned lie, but he was definitely telling the public something that wasn’t true.
He traded off a preferable distribution of masks when they were rare for a significant deterioration of public trust. Maybe that was the correct decision, but we may have ended up paying too high a price in the form of distrust-fueled lower vaccination rates.
If Fauci’s goal was to save masks for healthcare workers, I think it would have been better to just make mask sales to anyone but healthcare workers illegal. That would have accomplished the same purpose without the deterioration of public trust.
The Mask mandate was never supposed to protect you from them it was expected the mask mandate would protect them from you.
You can’t mandate a vaccine that does not stop transmission or infection. The justification for vaccinations that do is directly premised on the direct risk posed to others by illness, not financial consequences. If financial consequences were grounds to mandate particular health behaviors, there would truly be no end.
It was originally thought these vaccines would stop transmission and infection. The reason to get them now, and the evidence is strong, is to prevent death or disability.
Jeff Golden’s opposition to mandates for standard childhood vaccination for public school attendance was mere catering to the alt-med crowd in Ashland, and aligned neatly with Republicans who opposed them on other grounds.
Some folks just volunterr through action or inaction to be removed from the herd. THEY have the freedom to choose.
Unfortunately, the MAGAts who did often spread the virus to others.
Best to avoid them entirely. Life will be better (and it may be longer).
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