Re:Fine, I'll run a regression analysis. But it won't make y...
by defrost on Monday October 02, 2023 @01:37AM
(#37734363)
From TFA:
*The differences in state death rates are very likely because of differences in vaccine uptake*
Just to be clear, I don’t mean to imply that COVID is intrinsically more likely to target Republicans or anything like that. Rather, my claim is that COVID is considerably more deadly in people who haven’t been vaccinated, and since Republicans are less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats, state partisanship serves as a proxy for this.
Indeed, we can look at vaccination directly.
... age and vaccination rates alone explain more than half of the variation in COVID death rates between states since Feb. 2021.
Re:Fine, I'll run a regression analysis. But it won't make y...
by CamperBob2 on Monday October 02, 2023 @02:13AM
(#37734554)
He actually spent a lot of time working around the obvious: that COVID absolutely is intrinsically more likely to target Republicans. Not because of any merits or demerits associated with being a Republican, but because "Republican" is strongly correlated with "old as hell" in many if not most US states.
Right-wing media figures consistently fed their audience a diet of vaccine skepticism, conspiracy theories, and promotion of useless alternative treatments; e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/us/politics/coronavirus-v... . Because their audience skews older, this messaging had unusually-deadly consequences.
Why there's anything controversial about any of this, I have no clue. How does it make sense for him to write "I don't mean to say that COVID targets Republicans," followed by a paragraph that states exactly why it does?
Re:Fine, I'll run a regression analysis. But it won't make y...
by tempestn on Monday October 02, 2023 @06:20PM
(#37745224)
The whole point of the article is to address that criticism. Thats why he controlled for age. Also, red and blue states had similar death rates before vaccines, despite the virus still being more deadly to older people then.
The point of that statement is, the virus doesn't target someone because they're a Republican, but Republicans have been more likely to die from it because they're more likely to be unvaccinated.
Vaccine refusal played a part, certainly, in connection with the fact that conservatives are older. In many instances, a lot older. In other instances, not really that much older. The trend is unidirectional but the degree varies by state, as you'll find when you start comparing West Virginia and Florida to Maine and Vermont.
But the truth is inescapable: the older someone was, the more they needed to get vaccinated and boosted... and the less likely they did.