On Dec. 4, Orange County’s Deputy District Attorney, Kelly Ernby ― a former and prospective state assembly candidate ― was one of four speakers at a rally against vaccine mandates at Irvine City Hall.
“I think it’s the hill to die on,” another speaker said about “fighting for the freedom to choose to get vaccinated,” according to the Cal State Fullerton Daily Titan.
And that’s just what Ernby did. On Jan. 2 — unvaccinated — she died from COVID-19 complications.
One death is a tragedy. But Ernby is hardly alone. Another O.C. Republican state assembly candidate, Benjamin Yu, also unvaccinated, was in intensive care a week later, but managed to survive. And they’re typical of millions more. Republicans increasingly dominate the ranks of the unvaccinated. And the unvaccinated increasingly dominate the ranks of those COVID deaths, with misinformation and disinformation playing a major role, feeding on and amplifying social distrust.
If Democrats were a county unto themselves, they’d be well-protected, with a 91% vaccination rate, compared to 60% for Republicans as of December. Individual level data isn’t available to measure cases or deaths by party, but Charles Gaba at ACASignups.net has been tracking county-level rates against votes for Donald Trump since February 2021. The correlation for deaths was weak at first, but in April it began growing quickly for two and a half months, then more gradually ever since. On Jan. 10, he posted his final delta wave graphs, spanning June 15 to Dec. 15, 2021. “For that period of time, new COVID-19 case rates ran 2.46x higher in the reddest tenth of the U.S. than the bluest tenth” he wrote, “while COVID-19 death rates ran 5.77x higher.”
But that’s surely an under-estimate, according to a December USA Today investigation into excess deaths nationwide. COVID deaths have been undercounted by almost 200,000, they reported, and the practices responsible for the undercount are “especially pronounced in rural areas of the South and Western USA, areas that heavily voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.”
Denmark’s Example
America’s situation stands in stark contrast to Denmark, where all political parties have aligned around truthful communications, keeping COVID death rates below one quarter of America’s. This, combined with Gaba’s data, suggests that Blue America’s death rate is roughly similar to Denmark’s — at least where Democrats are more protected from infection via Republican neighbors.
A report last September found that “citizens’ high and stable trust in their health authorities has been a crucial factor in Denmark’s success,” two researchers wrote in the Washington Post. And despite the dramatic increase in Omicron’s transmissibility, “Denmark is still in a good place when it comes to public support,” the senior researcher, Michael Bang Peterson, told Random Lengths. “There has been a very high willingness to get booster vaccines for example,” he said.
Denmark isn’t perfect, but it provides a sobering baseline for comparison, showing us what a sane social response would look like. Virtually all the rationales for unhelpful behavior apply to Danes as much as Americans, but without the polarized political environment and amped-up social distrust they have managed to preserve social cohesion, a shared sense of reality, and dramatically more lives.
Denmark began with a strong perception of political unity, which was shaken only twice, Peterson reported in September: In November 2020, over the decision to cull all mink, and in February 2021, when the rightwing opposition strongly disagreed with the government’s reopening roadmap. Both times extensive negotiations lead to a common understanding among the parties and feelings of polarization among citizens waned.
The Omicron surge has brought about a slight decline of trust, but, “The only reason why I’m noticing the decline in trust with regards to the health authorities is that it has been so incredibly stable over the entire period,” Peterson said. Omicron “created a difficult situation for the health authorities because in a way they were back at square one in terms of dealing with uncertainty,” but “it’s more difficult to keep up the argument that this is a new virus and we don’t know what will actually happen at this point than in March 2020,” he said.
In addition, communication “particularly from politicians” blurred the initial understanding that vaccines were approved to prevent severe illness and “moved towards vaccines also being a good measure against the spread of infections.” Then, due to the timing of initial vaccinations, “You had waning immunity and you had Omicron hitting at the same time and that hurt trust in the vaccines,” he said.
But again, this was only a modest decline — from around 80% trust to 72%, still much higher than in the U.S. After nearly two years of pandemic, people are naturally exhausted, and they’ve taken different approaches to coping — those who are more cautious versus those more impatient to ‘return to normal.’ As opposed to the past two times, “The sense of unity is not so much challenged from what happens from the top down, but more what happens from the bottom up,” Peterson said. “It’s presumably more the debates you have with other fellow citizens.”
These findings were released in early January, and perhaps in response, The Danish health authorities just released a campaign this week about unity, encouraging people to sort of respect the opinions of others when it comes to COVID.
Disinformation: America’s Other Epidemic
So Fox News hosts are protected from dying from the lies they spread. But society as a whole isn’t. They both create an alternative reality where nonsense rules, and distort the shared reality where policies are made.
Denmark’s COVID chronicles could be America’s too, if it weren’t for Republicans and their media ecosystem which don’t just promote antagonistic opinions, but dangerously false disinformation. The kind that can get you killed, just like Kelly Ernby.
A November poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 78% of the public either believes or is unsure about at least one false statement about COVID and vaccines from a list of eight included in their survey. These include classic conspiracist claims — that the vaccine contains a microchip, that the government is intentionally exaggerating the number of COVID deaths, while hiding deaths from the vaccine — as well as that the vaccine has been shown to cause infertility or is dangerous for pregnant women, that you can get COVID from the vaccine, or that it alters your DNA, or that ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment for COVID. All these are completely false.
But there were sharp differences in who believes these and how much. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of unvaccinated adults and nearly half of Republicans (46%) believe or are unsure about at least half of the eight false statements, compared to just 19% of the vaccinated and 14% of Democrats.
Similar figures apply to trusted news sources. Nearly four in 10 of those who trust Fox News (36%) and One America News (37%) believe or are unsure about half the eight false statements, as do almost half (46%) of those who trust Newsmax, as opposed to less than one in six (between 11% and 16%) who trust information from CNN, MSNBC, network news, NPR and local television news.
It should be noted that Fox News has had strict COVID safety protocols, directly contrary to the propaganda most of its on-air hosts spout.
At first, as CNN reported on March 12, 2020, while Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity were calling COVID concerns “mass hysteria,” at the same time that the parent corporation had “restricted all non-essential travel.” Fast forward to July 20, 2021, and CNN reported that Fox had “quietly implemented its own version of a vaccine passport while its top personalities attack them.” And last month, the New York Times reported that Fox had tightened its vaccine rule, “removing a test-out option for N.Y.C. office workers.”
So Fox News hosts are protected from dying from the lies they spread. But society as a whole isn’t. They both create an alternative reality where nonsense rules, and distort the shared reality where policies are made. That alternative reality on the ground is what got Kelly Ernby killed, and put Benjamin Yu in the ICU. It also fueled the radicalization of indicted insurrectionist Alan Hostetter, described in our last issue, who spoke alongside other OC Republicans.
Disinformation In The Supreme Court
But that alternative also enveloped the Supreme Court, when it heard oral arguments challenging the proposed OSHA regulation requiring either vaccination or test and masking at all companies with 100 employees or more. The court itself has its own mandatory workplace protections, which is why two of the attorneys challenging the regulation had to testify remotely: they both had COVID. But letting OSHA do its job and protect ordinary American workers was just too much for the conservative majority to allow.
Along with their own pet peeves — the law was 50 years old, Chief Justice John Roberts complained, “I don’t think it had COVID in mind” — there were echos of Fox News disinformation, with Justice Neil Gorsuch (who refused to wear a mask) repeatedly invoking the false comparison to the flu (less than 1/10th as deadly) and Justice Samuel Alito raising the specter of vaccine risk, echoing Tucker Carlson’s false claim that almost 4,000 people had died from the vaccine, though “The actual number is almost certainly higher than that, perhaps vastly higher than that,” he lied.
Alito knew he was sounding like a crazy uncle, “I’m sure I will be misunderstood,” he said, while insisting that vaccine risk was somehow uniquely troubling. Back on planet Earth, Justice Elena Kagan observed that “regulators think of risk/risk tradeoffs constantly.” In the end, six conservative justices struck down the regulation, which would have saved over 6,500 lives and prevented 250,000 hospitalizations in the next six months, according to OSHA’s projections. That’s 6,500 workers and their loved ones dead because rightwing nonsense rules in the Supreme Court.
Students Fight Back
But there’s also a broader distortion of policy making across the board, which has made commonsense concerns controversial — such as saving students’ lives. Throughout the pandemic, teachers have been attacked for standing up for school safety. They’ve been portrayed as only thinking of themselves, even though students were always capable of transmitting COVID to each other and thus their families, and have been increasingly likely to get sick themselves as the virus evolves.
With Omicron, a breaking point seems to have been reached. Most dramatically, in New York City, thousands of students from more than 20 schools walked out of class on Jan. 11, demanding an online schooling option and greater COVID protections. A viral video showed hundreds of students streaming out of Brooklyn Technical High School, a prestigious public high school that’s the largest in the nation. It was followed three days later by walkouts in Boston and Chicago as well, with more due this week. But the walkouts are just the tip of the iceberg, an outgrowth of widespread online organizing generating petitions demanding protective changes.
As with gun violence and climate change previously, students are responding to a complete failure of adult leadership. And Denmark is a reminder that they’re absolutely right: it doesn’t have to be this way. The world could look completely different. Another world is possible.