Can Republicans Win Elections by Killing Off Their Voters?
COVID Misinformation Is Back in the News
We’re into year three of a world wide battle against a mutating virus, and yet another surge in cases is in progress. Hospitals in many areas are filling up with COVID patients and two other seasonal diseases (flu & RSV) are making their appearances. Some localities are reinstating mask requirements.
Meanwhile, Republicans have decided to push ahead with propaganda about a disease that’s disproportionally killing off their voters. I know it’s hard to believe, but bear with me.
Currently the US is experiencing roughly 2800 weekly Covid deaths. And then there are the twenty-five million people who’ve never quite recovered, a phenomenon known as LongCovid.
There’s plenty of good news on the pandemic front. In the early days of Covid, the death rate for those infected was greater than 3%; now it’s closer to 1%. Drugs like Paxlovid and mulnupiravir are now available for free to vulnerable populations and have a near-90% track record in reducing the severity of the disease and preventing deaths. .
Confusion, fueled by early promises by authorities and trumpeted in the media, has obscured the real success of vaccinations; those people who have avoided getting any of the shots are dying from Covid at seven times the rate of those who’ve at least had one does.
Locally, a story in Voice of San Diego says:
The number of deaths related to Covid-19 dropped by almost half during the second year of the pandemic in San Diego County, after vaccines became widely available to the general public.
The virus was either an immediate cause or a contributing factor in 4,264 deaths between March 2020 and March 2021. During the pandemic’s second year, 2,204 people died from Covid-related causes, according to death certificates compiled and analyzed by Voice of San Diego over the last two years.
The VOSD series also found that, even as the death rate in the county was declining generally, localities (mostly) in the East County with lower vaccination rates saw increases in their death tolls.
Covid-related death rates increased in just seven ZIP codes between the first and second years of the pandemic, but nowhere as much as Lakeside. Death rates are shown in deaths per 100,000.
Graphic from VOSD. Source: San Diego County Archives and U.S. Census Bureau. Death rates for ZIP codes with fewer than 10 deaths were not calculated
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A study by the Commonwealth Fund released this week found that Covid-19 vaccines have saved the lives of more than 3.2 million Americans and prevented more than 18.5 million hospitalizations. Eighty percent of the US population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, and more than 655 million doses, including boosters, have been administered in the two years since the vaccine was rolled out.
Without the vaccine, the study projects, there would have been nearly 120 million more infections. The total savings in medical costs from a mostly vaccinated population came to roughly $1.5 trillion.
The battle with this virus is hardly over. Newer variants have exhibited less severe symptoms in many people, even as vulnerable populations continue to see elevated fatality rates.
Here’s Katherine J Wu at The Atlantic:
All of this leaves the road ahead rather muddy. If COVID will be tamed one day into a common cold, that future definitely hasn’t been realized yet, says Yonatan Grad, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s School of Public Health. SARS-CoV-2 still seems to spread more efficiently and more quickly than a cold, and it’s more likely to trigger severe disease or long-term illness.
Still, previous pandemics could contain clues about what happens next. Each of the past century’s flu pandemics led to a surge in mortality that wobbled back to baseline after about two to seven years, Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me. But SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a flu virus; it won’t necessarily play by the same epidemiological rules or hew to a comparable timeline.
Even with flu, there’s no magic number of shots or past infections that’s known to mollify disease—“and I think we know even less about how you build up immunity to coronaviruses,” Gordon said.
Now for the really bad news. The ultimate victim in the pandemic may be public health agencies, as forces with anti-democratic agendas use Covid misinformation to promote themselves.
Mother Jones interviewed Aoife Gallagher, an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an anti-extremism think tank with offices in Europe and the United States. As new challenges like RSV emerge, anti-vaccine networks mobilize to distribute newly “researched” misinformation.
The sources of the false RSV narratives, she found, were well-known anti-vaccine activists. Del Bigtree, the host of an online anti-vax show called The Highwire, falsely claimed that Covid vaccines were responsible for RSV infections. Judy Mikovits, the discredited virologist behind the Plandemic Covid conspiracy film, falsely suggested that RSV (along with Ebola and Zika) could be cured with the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
Some of the misinformation that Gallagher found contained violent ideology. In an interview earlier this month with right-wing TV host Stew Peters, Stella Immanuel, a physician and former Trump adviser who suggested that reproductive health problems were caused by having dream sex with demons, claimed that mRNA RSV vaccines were part of a grand plan to surveil citizens. “They want to make sure that the mRNA technology gets into everybody because their whole idea is to monitor the whole of the human race,” she said. “They want surveillance under the skin like The Matrix, like a human cyborg.” Peters chimed in that if he were president, public health officials who promoted Covid vaccines would be “immediately arrested, indicted, tried. and if convicted, they would be fried—publicly executed.”
Now that Elon Musk is running Twitter, the floodgates on falsehoods about public health measures have been opened, allowing a torrent of once-banned and/or discredited voices to drown out actual information.
If they can coalesce behind a leader, the upcoming GOP-dominated House of Representatives has a list of forty-odd Biden administration officials to serve as punching bags for blowhards pushing conspiracies about the origin of the disease.
They’d be better off asking questions about why the Playbook for dealing with epidemic emergencies developed during the Obama administration was discarded by the Trump administration.
Here’s a report from May 2020, via Statnews:
Beginning the morning after his inauguration, a spectacular science-related tragedy has unfolded. The Trump administration has systematically dismantled the executive branch’s science infrastructure and rejected the role of science to inform policy, essentially reversing both Republican and Democrat presidential administrations since World War II, when Vannevar Bush, an engineer, advised Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.
President Trump’s pursuit of anti-science policy has been so effective that as the first cases of Covid-19 were breaking out in Wuhan, China, no meaningful science policy infrastructure was in place to advise him. As a consequence, America is suffering from a pandemic without a plan. Our responses are ineffectual and inconsistent. We are increasingly divided by misinformation and invidious messaging. And it’s not even over.
Or, the House Republicans might want to look into a newly released report from the House Intelligence Committee, as reported by the Washington Post
Beginning in late January 2020, U.S. intelligence agencies reported to senior Trump administration officials that the coronavirus spreading in China threatened to become a pandemic and spark a global health crisis.
But then-President Trump’s public statements over the next two months “did not reflect the increasingly stark warnings coursing through intelligence channels,” including the president’s daily brief, available to Trump and senior members of his administration, according to a report issued Thursday by the House Intelligence Committee.
By February, the intelligence community “had amply warned the White House in time for it to act to protect the country,” committee investigators concluded. Trump claimed in a May 2020 tweet that the intelligence community “only spoke of the Virus in a very non-threatening, or matter of fact, manner,” a statement that “simply does not match the record of intelligence analysis published in late January and February,” the committee found.
Of course, the chances of Republicans actually doing anything constructive on public health generally, and Covid specifically are slim and none.
I’m guessing that this topic has become fodder for Republicans who’d like to divert attention from their baseball card-hawking Dear Leader.
From Politico:
Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday asked the Florida Supreme Court to empanel a grand jury to investigate “wrongdoing” linked to the Covid-19 vaccines, including spreading false and misleading claims about the efficacy of the doses.
Most of the medical community, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FDA and Johns Hopkins, have emphasized that the Covid vaccine is safe and effective in preventing the virus and protecting against serious symptoms.
But DeSantis said during a live-streamed round table discussion with Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo that it’s against Florida law to mislead the public, especially when it comes to drug safety. He sought to undermine the efficacy of the Covid vaccine and claimed that vaccine manufacturers such as Moderna have made a fortune on Covid-19 mandates.
And they’re not just interested in jabbering about BigPharma. According to the Orlando Sentinel, individual vaccine prescribers could be investigated.
Once upon a time Gov. DeSantis simply opposed government mandates. He wasn’t anti-science or anti-vaccine, the argument went, the governor simply wanted people to make their own choices. Now, the Florida Republican is out to undermine public confidence, not only in public health experts, but in vaccines themselves.
Via Media Matters:
DeSantis is following the path blazed by Fox hosts like Ingraham and Tucker Carlson. Anti-vaccine sentiment would likely have become a problem for the vaccination campaign under any circumstances. But it took the network’s patented ability to manufacture grievances to turn it into a compelling primary issue for Republican politicians.
Fox spent the last two years sabotaging the U.S. vaccination effort. The network had a unique moral responsibility to try to convince their viewers to get vaccinated. Instead, its most prominent and trusted figures waged a nightly battle against the shots, stoking fears that they were useless or dangerous and that their distribution was part of a sinister plot to control Americans. The discourse was “great for ratings” – but deadly for Republicans, who were vaccinated against COVID-19 at lower rates and died from it at higher ones.
Let me repeat, for those of you skimming this post:
There's no shortage of evidence that the disease is disproportionately killing Republicans who avoid the vaccines.
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Finally, a for-real horror story about Covid via the New York Times:
Like a zombie in a horror film, the coronavirus can persist in the bodies of infected patients well after death, even spreading to others, according to two startling studies.
The risk of contagion is mainly to those who handle cadavers, like pathologists, medical examiners and health care workers, and in settings like hospitals and nursing homes, where many deaths may occur.
None of the “predictions” about 5G microchips, deaths from vaccines, or government plots to do something horrible related to the pandemic have come true.
Yet there are still idiots like this out there pushing yet another whacko-theory:
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Lead image: Tumisu/Kevin Phillips/Pixabay