Republicans Are Literally Dying to Uphold a Distorted Political Stance

One of the most noteworhty aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic is the manner in which a significant number of Republicans have chosen to literally sicken and die in order to demonstrate their fealty to Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenfuhrer, and/or talking heads of the right wing media.  The irony is that Republican governors and GOP legislatures are actively striving to disenfranchise minority voters and others they view as likely Democrat voters at the same time they are pushing policies - e.g., banning mask and/or vaccine mandates - that are killing members of their own base. Equally mind boggling is the failure of many in the GOP base to recognize that their behavior is self-destructive and counter to basic common sense.  It's hard to believe that all the Republicans choosing self-harm are all science rejecting, ignorance embracing evangelicals, One can't help but wonder if future studies won't be done to try to explain such insane behavior.  A piece at CNN looks at the phenomenon and lays much of the blame at the feet of Trump, Fox News, and other far right "news" outlets.  Here are highlights:

In his victory speech after the 2020 election, Joe Biden said this: "I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify. Who doesn't see red and blue states, but a United States."

Roughly nine months into his presidency, however, red states and blue states have widely diverged on what should be the least political of issues: Vaccination rates for Covid-19.

Dubbing it "Red Covid," The New York Times' David Leonhardt writes: 

"The political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state. ... Because the vaccines are so effective at preventing serious illness, Covid deaths are also showing a partisan pattern. Covid is still a national crisis, but the worst forms of it are increasingly concentrated in red America."

New data from Gallup provides stark numbers to back up Leonhardt's claim. More than 9 in 10 self-identified Democrats (92%) report that they have had at least one dose of one of the three vaccines for Covid-19. That number among Republicans? Just 56%. 

That's a stunning data point that tells a very clear story: there are Republicans who are getting seriously ill -- and even dying -- as some sort of distorted political stance. 

How did we get here? There's no single person to blame, but in my mind it's quite clear that former President Donald Trump and Fox News bear the lion's share of the responsibility.

Trump spent the first 16 months of the pandemic doing everything he could to downplay it. He insisted that the virus was "going to disappear." He was openly dismissive of mask-wearing; . . Trump also worked to make the debate about masking -- and steps to mitigate Covid-19 more generally -- about attempts by Democratic leaders to limit your freedoms. Lockdown orders were an abrogation of your rights -- as opposed to short-term attempts to slow community spread of the virus. Masks were nanny government trying to tell you what to do. 

Meanwhile, Fox News served as a sort of force multiplier for the politicization of the virus. That charge was led by prime-time hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, both of whom sought to cast the vaccine debate in terms of freedom abridged rather than a public health good. "We're not saying there is no benefit to the vaccine -- there may well be profound benefits to the vaccine," Carlson said over the summer, ignoring the scads of evidence that all three vaccines available for Covid-19 are not only safe but hugely effective in preventing serious illness and death from the virus. Carlson also regularly features anecdotal evidence of a person -- or persons -- with an adverse reaction to the Covid-19 vaccine, absent the context that the vaccine is, in the main, perfectly safe. 

The result of all of this misinformation and politicization of Covid-19 is stark. The 12 states with the highest case rate for every 100,000 people are all run by Republican governors. The 13 states with the highest hospitalization rate per 100,000 residents are all run by Republican governors. The 15 states with the highest percentage of deaths per 100,000 are all run by Republican governors. 

We are not just divided along political lines now. Our political divisions have created two entirely different Americas: One in which the vast majority of people are vaccinated and hospitalizations and deaths are low, and the other where the coronavirus continues to ravage the population.