The Staggeringly LETHAL Cost -- Of Blithely Believing Mis-Information, On REAL Bio-Science...

In matters of pandemic arrest / abatement, the trafficking in lies, or even just dubious information. . . clearly has lethal consequences. [While death rates nationwide are generally declining, it remains deeply troubling (to me at least) that so many are obviously dying. . . needlessly.]

Here's the scoop: NPR has just completed a post-hoc study, of the reddest-, versus the bluest-1,000 US county level COVID deaths related data. To be clear, this is not about causation, from voting GOP. This is about correlation.

That said, it seems inescapable that low vaccination rates in the reddest counties are being driven by belief in misinformation. And it seems equally clear that CDC messaging on vaccines is most widely accepted in the bluest counties. And, so -- death clusterings. . . follow those boluses / trends (see at above) -- and read this:

. . .NPR looked at deaths per 100,000 people in roughly 3,000 counties across the U.S. from May 2021, the point at which vaccinations widely became available. People living in counties that went 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.7 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.

In October, the reddest tenth of the country saw death rates that were six times higher than the bluest tenth, according to Charles Gaba, an independent health care analyst who's been tracking partisanship trends during the pandemic and helped to review NPR's methodology. Those numbers have dropped slightly in recent weeks, Gaba says: "It's back down to around 5.5 times higher. . . ."

I am genuinely puzzled as to how people like Candace Owens-Farmer and Alex Jones. . . are able to sleep at night, in view of the above. Puzzled -- and immensely saddened, that so many people are so. . . unflinchingly. . . gullible. To an increasingly lethal set of outcomes. Onward, just the same. Ever. . . onward.

नमस्ते