Originally published at: Study shows the pandemic killed more vaccine-denying Republicans than Democrats | Boing Boing
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Made even more mind-boggling by the fact he could have claimed responsibility for the policies that led to the development of effective vaccines. Instead he let Democrats own the program that saved millions of lives even though it started out as a bipartisan effort.
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Just read this on another site yesterday:
"Arizona’s Democratic attorney general candidate likely defeated her Republican rival due to disparities in COVID-19 death rates between blue and red voters.
Specifically, Democrat Kris Mayes beat Republican Abraham Hamadeh by a mere 280 votes statewide. According to Gaba, at least 900 and possibly as many as 4,100 more Donald Trump voters died of COVID than did Joe Biden voters in the state of Arizona—far exceeding the margin of victory between Mayes and Hamadeh. In other words, excess Republican deaths due to the pandemic may very well have been the reason for Mayes’ narrow win."
So we can thank the cultists for that anyway.
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Confusing title…is this more “vaccine denying Republicans” than Democrats of any kind? Or is it “vaccine denying Republicans” vs “vaccine denying Democrats”? I think it’s the first one, but I had to think about it for a bit.
And reading the article abstract, it looks like the difference is between all Republicans and all Democrats (though larger in counties with lower vaccinations).
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Too bad, so sad…
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I mean, the weird thing here is that Trump did claim responsibility for Operation Warp Speed and the vax in general, he publicly supported it quite strongly, and was consistently attacked by (and put into retreat by) his own base.
Like, there are wild, actually coherent pro-vax Trump quotes like:
“[The vax] works incredibly well, 95%, maybe even more than that, it works incredibly well, and I would recommend it to a lot of people who don’t want to get it, and a lot of those people voted for me frankly, we have our freedoms and we have to live by that, and I agree with that also, but it’s a great vaccine, it’s a safe vaccine, and it’s something that works.”
He was booed, and tried to stop the booing when boasting about the quality of the vax, after he revealed he got the booster!
“Look, we did something that was historic, we saved tens of millions of lives worldwide. We, together, all of us, not me,” Trump says in the video, which comes right before Trump receives the smattering of boos. He goes on to say that Covid-19 was going to “ravage the country far beyond what it is right now” if the vaccines had not been developed.
It’s easy to get into revisionist history, but Trump was adamantly pro-vax! I disagree with so much that man has done, and yet Operation Warp Speed actually did well, he supported it, and he actually tried to get people vaxxed! There’s a bit of “even a stopped clock is right twice a day” at play here but it’s easy to forget that it was his base and not the man himself that was anti-vax.
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It’s like the Darwin Awards on a large scale.
Next up: QAnon-compoops claim the disease was engineered to kill Republicans.
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He said a lot of shite and was inconsistent at best. He claimed his having contracted the virus made him immune, I certainly heard his followers bragging their “natural immunity” was superior to any vaccine. He claimed the antivirals were as good as a vaccine, and also kept cheerleading for hydrochloroquine. He kept his getting the vaccine a secret for a couple months. His jealousy of Fauci, and desire to blame the Chinese got people killed. He could have done worse, true, but he could have done a lot better.
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Trump has had to walk away from credit for the vaccine, because of the hostility of his core supporters. People blamed the right-wing covid denialism on Trump’s downplaying of covid, but it seems pretty clear it’s actually a caste issue. The right are now so opposed to doing anything that might help other people, especially those in out-groups, that they’re willing to harm themselves (and be in extreme denial about it all to justify it).
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I wonder if non-idiot Republican election consultants saw this coming, and thought, “we’re going to lose elections from people dying” and tried to do anything about it. Or, being Republican election consultants, did they think, in for a penny, in for a pound, since I’m going to hell anyway for being a Republican election consultant, there will be more of a need for Republican election consultants if Republicans winning elections is harder due to there being more dead Republicans.
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Trump DID create Operation Warp Speed, which rushed the vaccine through the trials and acceptance phases of the FDA approval process. BUT…
Trump sparked a rush on hydroxychloroquine when he admitted to taking it May 18, 2020. Nearly all reputable studies found no correlation to COVID Prevention and hydroxychloroquine, but in fact increased the chance of cardiac arrest. Federal testing was suspended in April of 2020.
In Apr 2020, Trump suggested that the government study the effects of sunlight exposure and of injecting bleach. (“We tested bleach, I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes.” - DHS Head of Science and Technology, as Trump stood behind him on the podium, smiling and nodding.)
Trump got early access to Regeneron in Nov 2020, which had some effect treating the worst of COVID’s symptoms, but didn’t actually cure or prevent the disease.
Trump received the vaccine. before January 20, 2021.
Trump and his wife kept that secret until the story was leaked in March 2021.
Trump was booed when he publicly admitted to taking the vaccine in Apr 2021. When it happened again, Trump stopped answering questions about his vaccination unless specifically asked about it during closed interviews.
Republicans began taking Ivermectin (horse dewormer) around August, 2021.
In a Texas speech in Dec 2021, (at a time the Biden White House was trying all sorts of incentives to boost vaccine acceptance - including money), Trump encouraged taking the vaccine again, and was greeted with a new round of boos. He stopped talking about it again.
By the date of the Texas speech (Dec 2021), 310,000 Americans had died from COVID. Over 1.3 million Americans have now died from COVID, over 6 million Americans have now been hospitalized, and vaccination rates in nearly all GOP states are still under 15%.
As long as Trump was applauded for his part in the creation of the vaccine, he supported it publicly, but the very second anyone pushed back, he dropped vaccination like a hot potato, nor did he make any attempt to slow down the phenomenal spread of Republican bullshit about it.
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Kinda neat when these sorts of natural experiments occur and can be mined ex post facto for useful information.
Although it’s never fun to find out there were deaths that could have been prevented, and in this case one didn’t need much of a study to be able to predict that more Rs would be killed by a pandemic they denied, then fought against every measure available to lessen the risks.
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This is the core of their being. Cruelty is always priority number one, even above and beyond self-preservation.
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The vaccine effort to combat coronavirus diseases started at least 20 years before the pandemic. SARS, MERS, and other outbreaks were already being worked on when the latest showed up.
So, in combination with an uptick in funding, the long-range effort paid off.
Warp Speed my f*ckin g ass.
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The initial warning on the importance of Covid by Rick Bright, former head of BARDA, went entirely unheeded by Trump and his administration. So, first it was Operation Duct Tape Over The Warning Lights, way before “Operation Warp Speed”.
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Let’s not forget that the Obama administration had a plan already in place for a future pandemic. Trump ignored this plan and disbanded the pandemic response team in 2018. He may not have been rabidly anti-vax like his base, but he was by no means pro-science. He was pro-vax reluctantly, sluggishly and inconsistently. And people died because of it.
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Well, in a way, it was. I mean, it was not ‘engineered’ but killing reality-deniers (often = Republicans, these days) is what viral pandemics do.
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Looks like a good study. It’s plausible this was vaccine-related based on the time period, so we can definitely go with that. It’s also possible it’s due to riskier behavior (or a combination of the two) because that’s around the time things started opening up again. I mean, it all comes back down to attitudes and how seriously the two dominant political cultures took the virus, and that potentially makes it difficult to pinpoint just one self-destructive thing they did.
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That’s addition by subtraction.
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What’s interesting is that these people, who almost entirely consider themselves “Christians” have given up even the pretense of notions of “Christian community.” It’s just pure tribalism above everything else, now, and a tribalism that manifests itself as cruelty to the out-group.
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