Interesting news item on NPR. Extracts below. Full text here: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vac...
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Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who live in areas that went for now-President Biden. That's according to a new analysis by NPR that examines how political polarization and misinformation are driving a significant share of the deaths in the pandemic...
People living in counties that went 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.78 times the death rates of those that went for Biden. Counties with an even higher share of the vote for Trump saw higher COVID-19 mortality rates...
Recent polling shows that partisanship is now this single strongest identifying predictor of whether someone is vaccinated. Polling also shows that mistrust in official sources of information and exposure to misinformation, about both COVID-19 and the vaccines, run high among Republicans...
Conservative talk radio host Phil Valentine (right), pictured with his brother, Mark (second from left). Phil had been skeptical about COVID and the COVID vaccines, sometimes mocking them on his talk show. Earlier this year, he contracted the virus and died...
Misinformation appears to be a major factor in the lagging vaccination rates. The Kaiser Family Foundation's polling shows Republicans are far more likely to believe false statements about COVID-19 and vaccines. A full 94% of Republicans think one or more false statements about COVID-19 and vaccines might be true, and 46% believe four or more statements might be true. By contrast, only 14% of Democrats believe four or more false statements about the disease...
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Neil Pakenham-Walsh, HIFA Coordinator, neil@hifa.org www.hifa.org
