COVID was way deadlier in Red State Republicans than for Democrats. What’s the role of anti-vaccine rhetoric?

For at least a year now, there has been strong but largely circumstantial evidence that right-wing anti-vaccine rhetoric was having deadly consequences in the United States.

Recently, however, a new working paper by three Yale public health and economics researchers—Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason Schwartz—is offering the most definitive and direct evidence I’ve seen yet confirming that Republicans have indeed been more likely to die because of COVID. The study, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, also confirms the scale of these deaths and points to the central role vaccine hesitancy has likely played in the tragedy.

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So, what did the authors discover? “Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points, or 76 percent, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats.”

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The figure below illustrates the key finding of the paper: It shows a spike in excess deaths around the time of the pandemic, and then a growing difference between Republicans and Democrats in the rate of excess deaths.

This is an excerpt. Read the full article here