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.
