How about first achieve national consensus that national healthcare should even be a priority? Anyways, in this case, many in the GOP are convinced that the vaccine is worse than the disease. The problem is information and not vaccine availability.
I was being as flippant as i interpreted OP to be. I dont think there is a significant disparity in medical care between R and D. Vaccines were available to all, after that its personal responsibility, you cant cry that your group is dying from something that you refuse to get a vaccine for.
What about having more patrolling republican dominated areas checking whether people properly wear masks and making vaccines mandatory with punishment for those who refuse them?
I feel like you're trying to draw a glib comparison to affirmative action. Shame on you if so - we're talking about people dying needlessly. It's not okay to blame behaviour in either case. This is a systemic issue brought about by the politicisation of science and a lack of robust, independent media.
I think they could be trying to draw a parallel between many lifestyle choices that result in adverse health outcomes - obesity, high risk sexual behaviour, extreme sports etc.
> It's sad to see how the medical system fails Republicans.
It has nothing to do with politics.
Excess deaths was because the medical infrastructure was overwhelmed. So ICU services were not available as normal.
From report:
> Overall, our results suggest that political party affiliation only became a substantial risk factor in Ohio and Florida after vaccines were widely available.
> ...
> Lack of individual-level vaccination status limits our ability to draw broad conclusions, but the results suggest that the well-documented differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republicans and Democrats [10, 7, 8, 13] have already had serious consequences for the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the United States.
> Excess deaths was because the medical infrastructure was overwhelmed. So ICU services were not available as normal.
I'm a bit confused how you come to this conclusion when the section you quote from the report says the lack of vaccination uptake is to blame along party lines.
overwhelmed medical infrastructure would hit both political parties equally. Unless you're suggesting that democrats in Florida have access to democrat-only-hospitals...
In this case the vaccine & the ICU stays were paid for by taxpayers. If anything they got special treatment that was way above & beyond what others complain about when it comes to the lack of equal access to medical resources.
Prior to covid, the R and D cohorts had identical excess deaths. 2 years later, following covid, there is a large gap. It seems unlikely theres a comorbidity that struck the unvaccinated, that cant be explained by covid.
Fig. 1(c) and Fig 2 show error bars, which is very useful. It appears that the excess deaths really didn't start having a significant (error bars not overlapping zero) Republican bias until November and December 2021, which is a lot later than I expected.
It lines up roughly with most data and research I've read. Aside from vaccination rates, other public covid-19 preventative measures didn't have effects that were strongly significant over time. Timing and a factors like age of populations, common living arrangements in an area, etc were all much larger factors and varied by region.
The book "The Molecule of More"[1] presents differences in conservatives' and liberals' mind traits, with descriptions of studies attempting to make someone conservative/liberal using drugs.
Overall, conservatives are more conventional and less predisposed to try new things. This may suggest that they are less likely to follow modern knowledge on healthy lifestyle, introduce nutritional changes, increase physical activity or get vaccinated.
Religion may play a part, too. If you believe that your health is out of your control, you may not me inclined to do any changes.
Is this why after several generations of the New Deal 'conservatives' wanted to get rid of it?
There is perhaps another divide than conservative liberal at work since obviously if one did not want to try new things they wouldn't want to take apart a system that had been working since before they were born.
>less likely to follow modern knowledge on healthy lifestyle
Seems like a claim that was invented. Physically fit men are substantially more likely to be conservative. [1] [2]
Your claims that "modern knowledge" even show how to be healthy are dubious, given food pyramids presented by government were co-opted by sugar peddlers, who bribed top universities like Harvard for pro-sugar 'research'. [3]
> Physically fit men are substantially more likely to be conservative. [1] [2]
Both studies talk about stronger/more muscular, not "physically fit" men. One can be fit without being muscular. You're confounding being fit, being muscular, and being healthy. There's overlap, but someone drinking only protein shakes and taking steroids to be very muscular because they believe "alphas" something is not someone being healthy.
It's pretty much impossible to get jacked by eating garbage and just hitting the gym for hours a day. Diet is an important component, and gyms (and habitual gym users) won't tell you to drink only protein shakes.
In fact, gym attendance has been directly linked to lifespan and therefore general health.
I don't think it's that simple. The politicization along the US lines is a specific US phenomenon, it appears to be the result of a polarization along the two-party system. I don't see how it can be explained by political opinions themselves.
To give you a comparison, before Trump and the pandemic, German antivaxers used to be from the esoteric, ecological nutrition and alternative healing communities, a subculture highly skeptic to traditional medicine with many connections to other fringe cultures. These were mostly left-wing progressives. The right-wing political flavoring came during the pandemic and from the US. This lead to rather bizarre scenes like this radical right-wing vegan cook book author or 70s peace-movement elderly feminists marching together with young Neo-Nazis in antivax protests.
Dont let yourself be fooled by the lamestream media, he wasnt pretending, he really drove that truck, actually a bigger one that that. The biggest truck anyone had ever driven.
Not directly, no. I suppose I'd interpret it as obliquely suggesting that he was not in fact "driving the bus", but of course that's a debatable proposition for any President and any policy.
And yet there's insane distrust amongst many republicans towards it. Its weird, trump himself is getting booed at his own ralleys when he speaks in favour of vaccination. It feels like a runaway train
Trump only got on the pro-vaccination bandwagon because his efforts to downplay and deny the scope of the pandemic initially, so as to not distract from his pro-economy election narrative, became politically untenable. It was Trump who called it Kung Flu and refused to wear a mask in public and mocked anyone who did, and encouraged people to resist and protest lockdown rules and health guidelines, and it was Trump who turned resource distribution into a partisan grift.
If you want to give Trump credit for the vaccine, you need to give him credit for sabotaging and deliberately undermining the effort as well. Trump is the reason the next pandemic is going to be far worse than it needs to be, because thanks to him, anti-vaxx conspiracy belief has been normalized and half the US has made mistrust of science and refusal to vaccinate a fundamental part of their political and cultural identity.
But yes, he got the vaccine completed in record time. Kudos to him for that.
Perhaps they're aware how many scientific studies are unreplicable. Or maybe that medical error is a leading cause of death. Maybe they know about thalidomide babies.
Or perhaps they simply didn't want to take drugs pushed by people who actively hate them and demean them at every opportunity.
Or possibly they're aware of the tendency of governments the world over to use emergencies to seize power, as has undeniably been done here.
Or maybe they believe in their own version of "my body, my choice".
Possibly also they don't want to take scientific advice on people who suddenly insist that boys can be girls, and that anyone who disagrees should be banished from society.
It's foolish to think one party "owns" science, and natural that people would bristle when dictated to by perhaps the smarmiest smuggies that have ever existed on the planet.
It's impossible to stop noticing the same perpetrators doing the same things over and over.
Also, as you're no doubt aware, calling someone "smug" and calling someone a Russian-backed Nazi science-denier (and then trying to get them fired and/or prosecuted) are very, very different.
Dude, you couldn’t even get through complaining about people calling you names without resorting to the same thing that you’re accusing others of doing. I implore you: look into the mirror and seriously consider the idea that you might be part of the problem.
LOL. This might be my favorite account on HN so far. 100 comments[1] in 2.5 years, and not a single comment that includes the words "software", "code", etc. -- but many comments including the words "woke", "progressive", etc. Hilarious.
You don't "trust" science, it is even the entire point of science to be distrustful: To be ever skeptical of and verify any claims, and always be on the lookout for better theories and findings.
If you "trust" science, you're just being religious. The people who don't just immediately take the words of the CDC or WHO at face value are more scientific than the people who do.
Paranoia is not science. Skepticism is not the same as paranoia.
Science is full of trust. Science is rarely replicated from first principles. There just isn't time. The further away one gets from one's own field, the more one relies on the experts in that field.
People who mistrust the CDC and WHO, but accept anything about physics, chemistry, or anything else that isn't their specific area of research, aren't being "skeptical". They're just being ideologically biased, affirming their preconceptions without applying that same skepticism to the theories that support their ideologies.
The overwhelming number of virologists, epidemiologists, doctors, and public health experts listen to what the CDC and WHO says because they do know what they're talking about. And they listen as the information changes, because they change their minds when the data available changes. What do you do?
It is utterly impossible to "think for yourself" when it comes to modern science. To fully understand the thinking and evidence that goes into some of these statements might take decades. You should trust it because all parts of the chain of arguments are being critically looked at by experts all the time.
If you distrust scientists just like you distrust priests, it is your blind distrust that's deeply irrational (under the guise of rationality no less).
It's quite straightforward to trust Physics and Chemistry that delivers verifiable product. It's another thing to trust Sociology and Medicine with a track record of deceit, hubris and strong political coupling.
Medicine is demonstrably saving lives year on year. Some plagues have been entirely eliminated; for others we're on the verge of stamping them out.
Medicine is a more complex science than physics or chemistry, with more variables leading to more room for errors. But nobody seemed to think medicine was political until it coincided with a political ideology that happened to have a penchant for declaring sciences "political" whenever they didn't want to accept them.
The practice of national medicine necessarily becomes a cross of the disciplines Sociology and Medicine. I don't doubt medicines complexity or its ability but its not acting alone here. You are not prescribing well tested vaccines in a vacuum, you are best guessing and ramrodding via the sociological practice of "nudge".
I'm sure this was intended sarcastically. On the surface it would seem that wearing a mask alone in a car isn't going to help you at all, and while you're alone in your car it doesn't but there are scientific reasons it could have been logical to do so.
Once you've used your mask you're supposed to throw it away, because there is potentially virus on the outside of it. You are even supposed avoid touching the outside of the mask when you take it off.
The other reason that comes to mind is, it could just help the remember to have it on when they go from place to place.
You are just beind pedantic. I could have used jogging alone with mask on, in a park when no one is around which is known to be zero risk. Yet it was widely seen.
The vaccines dramatically reduce mortality for elderly people, that's very well established. So any difference in vaccination rates between groups (of similar age or age-corrected) should show this kind of difference.
> Post-vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and
Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the
Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats
is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines
became widely available.
> So any difference in vaccination rates between groups
You need to control for co-mordibities too.
Also, people tend to become more conservative as they age (its a fact) so you should expect Republicans to be older than Democrats on average. Garbage study?
There are plenty of articles about the UK health system being overwhelmed and overloaded. That seems like a plausible hypothesis for explaining a higher number of excess deaths.
It's not currently overloaded and overwhelmed with Covid patients. I would argue that this is the fallout of the policies put in place since March 2020 - a deadly combination of less healthcare available due to the increased resources dedicated to Covid protections, and a 2+ year backlog of people who have been waiting to access healthcare. That backlog is also growing, as our GP healthcare system (which is usually the gateway to accessing healthcare) has effectively ground to a halt.
It's hard to see how it would be worse if we hadn't "Saved the NHS".
In France, we have the same issues, but it clearly would've been worse without the special mesures taken in hospitals.
However, our response still lacked 'localization' (if you have another word, be my guest), and would've been better if hospitals in less impacted areas weren't also stepping down on consultations/operations after the initial surge. My cousin from eastern France sent more than 50 patients to western France, and 8 in Germany during the two weeks following the lockdowns, so I'm not saying it was a bad idea at first, but after the first wave, we could have adapted better.
The issue is that everything is politicized now, i don't like the government much but i am able to say they reacted well in some regards (and the administration was surprisingly competent and effective, i worked with them at the time and in time of crisis, it's night and day), and fucked things up in other.
Also people choose weird hills do die on. If you're wrong, you're wrong. You might have had circumstances why, and maybe you're only 50% wrong, but just accept it.
> It's not currently overloaded and overwhelmed with Covid patients.
Do you have a reference for this?
I'm not doubting you but a couple months ago I visited the A&E in Whitechapel for an ankle injury. I asked one of the nurses and the doctor who saw me (they were both lovely but seemed quite stressed) about this and both separately told me there are still too many Covid patients in the hospital. That, and the fact that NHS personnel keep having to isolate.
The UK has around 150k hospital beds, and 5k mechanical ventilation beds, so its never been about the absolute numbers of Covid patients. It's always been the additional workload due to Covid policies (and that includes staff isolation). Those make sense, if it is deemed that catching and/or spreading Covid is worse than any other healthcare outcome.
So you mean that because there are plenty of hospital beds and ventilators, the system is not overwhelmed?
I see the doctors, nurses and the rest of the staff as part of the system. If there's not enough of them to cope with the demand, then the system is overwhelmed.
No, I chose my words very carefully. The NHS is still overwhelmed/falling apart, but it was not the number of Covid patients that did this.
The biggest difficulty has been the Covid policies put into place, both inside and outside hospitals. It's difficult, time-consuming, and stressful to follow those policies (both parents work for the NHS, btw), not to mention the number of staff who had to isolate. The social services that would receive many patients after their hospital stay are also overwhelmed/falling apart (probably for similar reasons), so many patients cannot be discharged.
I'll say it again - it all makes sense, if avoiding Covid is the absolute number 1 priority, and if "letting it rip" would have made things worse than they are now.
I do think that NHS staff did their very best to follow protocols (one of my parents went into great detail about all of the steps they had to go through in between seeing each patient). However, the idea that disposable plastic smocks and perspex screens will do much against an infectious airbourne respiratory virus is just silly on its face.
Really, given the sheer amount of people who caught Covid in hospitals, they should have shut the hospitals and let almost everything else remain open.
Based on data from Adams, OH 27% of the voters are registered republicans, 5.5% are registered democrats. Sadly, this data is missing from the article.
The mortality data is from a private source, so most likely can't be shared. But the sample size is almost 600k people, and it's comparing aggregate death rates. Any power deficiency would be reflected in the p values and final results.
It's kind of sad that fear for your personal safety causes people to endanger their personal safety in changing world in which intuitively prefered "as it was before" is no longer safest alternative.
It was a really terrible decision to kick one of the biggest advocates of vaccines of twitter and facebook, someone who is trusted precisely in those communities that are most distrustful of vaccines.
98 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadOr is this one of those times when it's okay to blame behavior?
sadly any compromise bill just results in the wrong bill
no public option, which was scrapped from Obamacare (to get it passed into law at all), means no super negotiator with insurers
no medicare ability to negotiate, means no super negotiator with insurers
these nuances don't have national consensus, amongst people that are open to national healthcare
The paper goes into it, just vaccinate everybody.
But also yes, some of this poetic justice.
It has nothing to do with politics.
Excess deaths was because the medical infrastructure was overwhelmed. So ICU services were not available as normal.
From report:
> Overall, our results suggest that political party affiliation only became a substantial risk factor in Ohio and Florida after vaccines were widely available. > ... > Lack of individual-level vaccination status limits our ability to draw broad conclusions, but the results suggest that the well-documented differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republicans and Democrats [10, 7, 8, 13] have already had serious consequences for the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the United States.
> Excess deaths was because the medical infrastructure was overwhelmed. So ICU services were not available as normal.
I'm a bit confused how you come to this conclusion when the section you quote from the report says the lack of vaccination uptake is to blame along party lines.
overwhelmed medical infrastructure would hit both political parties equally. Unless you're suggesting that democrats in Florida have access to democrat-only-hospitals...
Overall, conservatives are more conventional and less predisposed to try new things. This may suggest that they are less likely to follow modern knowledge on healthy lifestyle, introduce nutritional changes, increase physical activity or get vaccinated.
Religion may play a part, too. If you believe that your health is out of your control, you may not me inclined to do any changes.
[1] https://moleculeofmore.com/
So, conservatives are more ... conservative?
Yeah, exactly
Here it is stated again
Enjoy
There is perhaps another divide than conservative liberal at work since obviously if one did not want to try new things they wouldn't want to take apart a system that had been working since before they were born.
Seems like a claim that was invented. Physically fit men are substantially more likely to be conservative. [1] [2]
Your claims that "modern knowledge" even show how to be healthy are dubious, given food pyramids presented by government were co-opted by sugar peddlers, who bribed top universities like Harvard for pro-sugar 'research'. [3]
[1] https://www.brunel.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/articles/Muscu...
[2] https://www.dmarge.com/political-workout
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
> Seems like a claim that was invented.
You do realize that you ignored "This may suggest"? Also, the text we're discussing points at differences in being vaccinated. Which you also omitted.
Both studies talk about stronger/more muscular, not "physically fit" men. One can be fit without being muscular. You're confounding being fit, being muscular, and being healthy. There's overlap, but someone drinking only protein shakes and taking steroids to be very muscular because they believe "alphas" something is not someone being healthy.
In fact, gym attendance has been directly linked to lifespan and therefore general health.
To give you a comparison, before Trump and the pandemic, German antivaxers used to be from the esoteric, ecological nutrition and alternative healing communities, a subculture highly skeptic to traditional medicine with many connections to other fringe cultures. These were mostly left-wing progressives. The right-wing political flavoring came during the pandemic and from the US. This lead to rather bizarre scenes like this radical right-wing vegan cook book author or 70s peace-movement elderly feminists marching together with young Neo-Nazis in antivax protests.
And this fits my world view and comes to a conclusion I agree with so it's clearly "science".
https://time.com/4711764/donald-trump-pretend-truck-photo-wh...
Dont let yourself be fooled by the lamestream media, he wasnt pretending, he really drove that truck, actually a bigger one that that. The biggest truck anyone had ever driven.
"Hey, FDA, Pfizer, etc - I want this vaccine in x months make it work and shout if anyone gives you trouble."
I'd imagine coming from any president that would carry some weight.
If you want to give Trump credit for the vaccine, you need to give him credit for sabotaging and deliberately undermining the effort as well. Trump is the reason the next pandemic is going to be far worse than it needs to be, because thanks to him, anti-vaxx conspiracy belief has been normalized and half the US has made mistrust of science and refusal to vaccinate a fundamental part of their political and cultural identity.
But yes, he got the vaccine completed in record time. Kudos to him for that.
Or perhaps they simply didn't want to take drugs pushed by people who actively hate them and demean them at every opportunity.
Or possibly they're aware of the tendency of governments the world over to use emergencies to seize power, as has undeniably been done here.
Or maybe they believe in their own version of "my body, my choice".
Possibly also they don't want to take scientific advice on people who suddenly insist that boys can be girls, and that anyone who disagrees should be banished from society.
It's foolish to think one party "owns" science, and natural that people would bristle when dictated to by perhaps the smarmiest smuggies that have ever existed on the planet.
Or perhaps they didn’t want to take drugs pushed by people they actively hate and demean at every opportunity.
> perhaps the smarmiest smuggies that have ever existed on the planet
Whelp, that didn't take long.
Also, as you're no doubt aware, calling someone "smug" and calling someone a Russian-backed Nazi science-denier (and then trying to get them fired and/or prosecuted) are very, very different.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?type=all&query=author%3Amansion7
Summoning mass false reporting brigades to destroy the livelihoods of innocent people is not.
I can't help that it's mostly one side doing it. Perhaps if it were less blatantly obvious, people would stop noticing it.
If you "trust" science, you're just being religious. The people who don't just immediately take the words of the CDC or WHO at face value are more scientific than the people who do.
Science is full of trust. Science is rarely replicated from first principles. There just isn't time. The further away one gets from one's own field, the more one relies on the experts in that field.
People who mistrust the CDC and WHO, but accept anything about physics, chemistry, or anything else that isn't their specific area of research, aren't being "skeptical". They're just being ideologically biased, affirming their preconceptions without applying that same skepticism to the theories that support their ideologies.
The overwhelming number of virologists, epidemiologists, doctors, and public health experts listen to what the CDC and WHO says because they do know what they're talking about. And they listen as the information changes, because they change their minds when the data available changes. What do you do?
I take their words with a grain of salt just like with anyone else.
Blind trust in science is no different from religious worship.
It is utterly impossible to "think for yourself" when it comes to modern science. To fully understand the thinking and evidence that goes into some of these statements might take decades. You should trust it because all parts of the chain of arguments are being critically looked at by experts all the time.
If you distrust scientists just like you distrust priests, it is your blind distrust that's deeply irrational (under the guise of rationality no less).
https://xkcd.com/1520/
Medicine is demonstrably saving lives year on year. Some plagues have been entirely eliminated; for others we're on the verge of stamping them out.
Medicine is a more complex science than physics or chemistry, with more variables leading to more room for errors. But nobody seemed to think medicine was political until it coincided with a political ideology that happened to have a penchant for declaring sciences "political" whenever they didn't want to accept them.
> Post-vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.
You need to control for co-mordibities too.
Also, people tend to become more conservative as they age (its a fact) so you should expect Republicans to be older than Democrats on average. Garbage study?
The parties are big tent enough that age structure differences disappear thanks to the law of big numbers.
It's hard to see how it would be worse if we hadn't "Saved the NHS".
However, our response still lacked 'localization' (if you have another word, be my guest), and would've been better if hospitals in less impacted areas weren't also stepping down on consultations/operations after the initial surge. My cousin from eastern France sent more than 50 patients to western France, and 8 in Germany during the two weeks following the lockdowns, so I'm not saying it was a bad idea at first, but after the first wave, we could have adapted better.
The issue is that everything is politicized now, i don't like the government much but i am able to say they reacted well in some regards (and the administration was surprisingly competent and effective, i worked with them at the time and in time of crisis, it's night and day), and fucked things up in other.
Also people choose weird hills do die on. If you're wrong, you're wrong. You might have had circumstances why, and maybe you're only 50% wrong, but just accept it.
Do you have a reference for this?
I'm not doubting you but a couple months ago I visited the A&E in Whitechapel for an ankle injury. I asked one of the nurses and the doctor who saw me (they were both lovely but seemed quite stressed) about this and both separately told me there are still too many Covid patients in the hospital. That, and the fact that NHS personnel keep having to isolate.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare
The UK has around 150k hospital beds, and 5k mechanical ventilation beds, so its never been about the absolute numbers of Covid patients. It's always been the additional workload due to Covid policies (and that includes staff isolation). Those make sense, if it is deemed that catching and/or spreading Covid is worse than any other healthcare outcome.
So you mean that because there are plenty of hospital beds and ventilators, the system is not overwhelmed?
I see the doctors, nurses and the rest of the staff as part of the system. If there's not enough of them to cope with the demand, then the system is overwhelmed.
The biggest difficulty has been the Covid policies put into place, both inside and outside hospitals. It's difficult, time-consuming, and stressful to follow those policies (both parents work for the NHS, btw), not to mention the number of staff who had to isolate. The social services that would receive many patients after their hospital stay are also overwhelmed/falling apart (probably for similar reasons), so many patients cannot be discharged.
I'll say it again - it all makes sense, if avoiding Covid is the absolute number 1 priority, and if "letting it rip" would have made things worse than they are now.
Not that they were followed particularly well. My dad was in hospital for unrelated reasons, caught COVID and died within 3 days.
I do think that NHS staff did their very best to follow protocols (one of my parents went into great detail about all of the steps they had to go through in between seeing each patient). However, the idea that disposable plastic smocks and perspex screens will do much against an infectious airbourne respiratory virus is just silly on its face.
Really, given the sheer amount of people who caught Covid in hospitals, they should have shut the hospitals and let almost everything else remain open.