....the more Republican your county, the more likely you are to die of COVID

 

Of the 20 least-vaccinated states today, Trump carried 17 in the 2020 election. According to one analysis, in the most Republican tenth of America only 42 percent of people were fully vaccinated by the end of last year. In Washington State, for example, the shrinking unvaccinated minority have lately comprised more than nine out of 10 COVID victims under 65, and three-quarters of the older ones. More and more, the unvaccinated (three out of five of whom are Republicans) and those killed by COVID are distinctly GOP subsets.

It was a graph I saw in the fall that startled me into taking the mass-human-sacrifice idea seriously. The Duke University sociologist Kieran Healy’s granular analysis plotted the number of deaths and degree of Republicanism in each of America’s 3,000 counties, then divided the counties into 10 groups from reddest to bluest, each containing a tenth of the U.S. population. In the reddest counties—those where 70 percent or more voted for Trump—the COVID death rates from last June through November were five or six times the death rates in places at the other end of the political scale. And step by step up the blue-to-red scale, the statistical correlation is amazingly consistent—the more Republican your county, the more likely you are to die of COVID.

At their imperial peak 500 years ago, the Aztec rulers sacrificed 20,000 or more people each year, some estimates suggest. By the reckoning of experts at the Kaiser Family Foundation, counting only the “COVID-19 deaths [that] could have been prevented by vaccination,” the number of Americans unnecessarily and avoidably killed in the U.S. from just last June to November is 163,000.