Voting Republican may be hazardous to your health.
At least that’s the message the Washington Post wants to convey to us.
A 25 July WaPo article described a study by Yale scientists in which looked at mortality data in Florida and Ohio for the years 2020-2021. They found the age-adjusted death rate death rate for members of both parties was identical at the start of the pandemic. As covid swept through the population, deaths rose equally for members of both parties. But starting in April 2021, the death rate for Republican voters rose faster than for Democratic ones. For Republican voters, there was a forty-three percent increase in excess deaths. If you look at the Supplementary Material and do the math, that works out to a one in 175 increase in the risk of dying.
With proper scientific caution, the researchers don’t actually say that differences in vaccination rates was driving the excess mortality. But that is clearly the conclusion we are supposed to draw here.
What are we to make of these results?
Before the covid pandemic, I never heard of anyone using party affiliation as a proxy for vaccination status. Is this a recognized epidemiological technique? My head is hurting trying to think of all the potential confounders here.
There’s an old saying, torture any dataset long enough, and it will tell you what you want to hear. But what if the researchers are right? If you look at the data, there was no difference in the death rates of Republican and Democratic voters aged twenty-five through sixty-four. All of the excess deaths occurred in voters past the age of sixty-five, and the vast majority were in voters aged seventy-five or older.
Way back in December of 2020, the FDA made it clear the data submitted for Emergency Use Authorization did not tell us if the shot stopped transmission. And even the CDC has stopped pretending it does. Without that, you cannot even begin to make the case for vaccine mandates. And our rulers stopped pretending this was about science or evidence when they denied the reality of natural immunity and forced people who had already recovered from the covid to get the shot, on pain of losing their livelihoods and presumably everything they had if they refused to comply.
But the pandemic response was never about science or evidence. It was about throughput – moving as much product as possible. A needle in every arm.
I’ve never said the shot has never prevented a single covid case or death. And I’ve never said there could be no identifiable subgroup of the population who would experience a net reduction in risk from the shot. But the burden of proof is on anyone who says it does.
And even if it turns out that it does, I am afraid our public health authorities have so recklessly squandered their credibility in these past three and a half years that they would have a very hard time getting that message out.
My book The Day the Science Died: Covid Vaccines and the Power of Fear is now available on amazon.
The MSM loves to portray Trump as urging his supporters not to get shots. But that is not true. He repeatedly urged it on crowds at his speaking events. Until a few started booing.
A lot of Republicans got the shot and urged others to. Especially Boomers who implicitly trust their doctors and look on all "breakthrough" medicines with a childlike wonder.