Republican Politicians Caused Thousands of Their Voters To Die During COVID

As many as 100,000 Republicans or more may have died needlessly during the COVID pandemic as a result of false and misleading health advice given to them by political leaders, “according to a new paper, “The Costs of Polarizing a Pandemic.”

“We argue that partisanship was one of the most important risk factors during the pandemic,” lead author Jay Van Bavel, PhD told Random Lengths News. “In fact, we found that it was the single biggest predictor of vaccination rate across the country (bigger that education, age, race, etc.)”

“The deadly toll of the pandemic was not inevitable—it was driven, at least in part, by political leaders like Trump, who denied the risks and politicized the pandemic, connecting beliefs and actions to party identity,” the paper says. “Our analysis suggests that the catastrophic death toll in the United States was largely preventable and due, in large part, to the polarization of the pandemic.”

Behavioral differences that increased the risk of infection and death occurred repeatedly, first with social distancing, then masking, and finally with vaccination rates. “After the vaccination program was fully implemented, the estimated difference in death rates between the average Republican leaning county and the average Democratic-leaning county was 78 people per 100,000,” the paper notes. “The influence of partisanship on mortality increased following full implementation of the vaccination program—suggesting that partisanship explained increasingly more of the disparity in fatalities between U.S. counties.”

Partisan differences reflected the polarization of partisan social identities, has been increasing around the world, but nowhere more than the US. “Once a social identity has become tightly associated with particular behaviors (e.g., to wear a mark or, alternatively, to actively resist wearing a mask), those behaviors are likely to become normative within the community,” the paper explains. “This is why social norms and cultural influences may have played such an important role in COVID-19 behaviors.

The paper concludes with some forward-looking advice. “First, public messaging should place a strong emphasis on the common identities shared by members of a society rather than creating division or competing beliefs between partisan identities,” it advises. “Second, nonpartisan experts should be placed at the forefront of the crisis response, as unbiased sources of information, to provide expert recommendations and policy proposals.” It goes on to say, “Messages from leaders conveying social norms can also be effective. Political elites have a strong effect on people’s support for policies designed to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Finally, it notes that social sciences have a public and social health role to play as well. “We advocate that policymakers leverage the best evidence from social and behavioral science,” the paper says. “Research on the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that curated insights from social and behavioral science were highly accurate. For instance, a comprehensive assessment of 742 scientific articles on human behavior during COVID-19 found that 89% of the key claims made by a group of social scientists at the onset of the pandemic were supported by subsequent research. Thus, the lessons drawn from the large body of research on the COVID-19 pandemic may be applied to other societal threats, such as the climate crisis; rising economic, racial, and gender-inequality issues; and other global issues.”