By Marty Schladen Arizona || Arizona Mirror
It’s already known that hundreds of thousands of Americans would still be alive if every eligible person had gotten vaccinated against COVID-19. Now new research strongly suggests that many more of those “excess deaths” in Ohio and Florida were among people with Republican voter registrations.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that Republicans were more reluctant to get vaccinated against the novel coronavirus, which has so far killed more than 1 million in the United States and more than 6.5 million worldwide. A Cornell University study found that former President Donald Trump was the “single largest driver” of misinformation about the disease and research by European economists indicated that watching a lot of Fox News correlated with vaccine hesitancy.
A paper published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research puts some numbers to the relationship between voting Republican and dying of COVID — most likely because lower rates of Republicans got vaccines once they became widely available.
In it, three Yale University researchers selected Ohio and Florida and took a look at “excess deaths” — the number of deaths in a given time period that is in excess of the number that was expected. While no single death in that measure can be attributed to a given cause, it’s safe to assume that in a deadly global pandemic, a spike in the number of excess deaths is largely attributable to the disease.
That’s what the Yale researchers found in this case.
“In 2018 and the early parts of 2020, excess death rates for Republicans and Democrats are similar, and centered around zero,” wrote the researchers, Jacob Wallace, Jason L. Schwartz and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham. “Both groups experienced a similar large spike in excess deaths in the winter of 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.”
