by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
This week National Public Radio (NPR) has been airing the results of a study that it conducted on the effects that political polarization and misinformation have on public health, and in particular the effect that those variables have on deaths from COVID. The news organization looked at 3,000 counties in the United States, and compared those counties in the way they voted in the 2020 presidential elections with the numbers of Covid deaths that they have reported since last May when COVID shots were becoming widely available.
The results of the NPR survey probably would not surprise many of us. People in strong pro-Trump counties were nearly three times as likely to die of COVID as people in counties that were strongly pro-Biden. NPR said that "misinformation" was to blame for that disparity.
The study also showed that in October of 2021 the "reddest" tenth of the nation saw death rates from COVID that were six times higher than the COVID death rates in the "bluest" tenth of the nation. A major contributing factor to those results appeared to be the fact that vaccination rates were significantly lower in the areas where Trump ran strongest, again a result of political polarization and misinformation.
NPR essentially just told America what we already knew. COVID vaccinations work, and people who choose not to believe that fact of science due to strong partisan beliefs or information obtained through unreliable sources, are much more at risk for contracting COVID and dying than are people who accept and act on the latest scientific information.
There is a strong partisan divide that is being reflected in a body count - and every toe-tag represents one less ballot that will be cast in the next election. COVID denial doesn't really sound like an effective political strategy, but who am I to try and interfere with evolution?
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