Willful Ignorance and the Omicron Threat to Red America

As Republican controlled state legislatures continue their efforts to disenfranchise minoeity voters, Fox News talking heads, fundamentalist pastors and many national Republicans continue to fan vaccination hesitancy and expose much of the Republican Party base to avoidable illness and death from Covid-19.  It's as if the party leadership and Fox anchors have a suicide pact with the party base except for the fact that most of those leaders and mouth pieces on Fox are themselves vaccinated and are thus cynically gambling with the lives of their contituents and audience for political and ratings advantage.  The moral depravity of these people is truly numbing.  So too is the stupidity of the Republican Party base that both believes this charlatans and seemingly would rather needlessly die rather than have "liberals" and Democrats tell them what to do.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this reality in the face of the surging Omicron variant.  Here are excerpts:

Tucker Carlson could do it. So could Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin or Donald Trump himself.

One of these conservative figures could go on the air and explain that the Omicron variant has placed much of their audience in grave danger. They could remind people that they have been skeptical of vaccines at times — but that Omicron is different. It is so contagious that it may quickly sweep the country.

As they issued this warning, they could still take their usual swipes at the political left, mocking panicky liberals for wearing masks outdoors and forcing children to sit apart in cold schoolyards.

I don’t have any illusions about how likely this scenario is, but I do think that unvaccinated Americans — who are disproportionately Republican — are now in even more danger than a few weeks ago. Omicron seems to be qualitatively more contagious than any earlier variant.

In the U.S., partisanship is the biggest factor determining vaccination rates. If Democratic voters made up their own country, it would be one of the world’s most vaccinated, with more than 91 percent of adults having received at least one shot. Only about 60 percent of Republican adults have done so.

This vaccination gap has created a huge gap in death rates, one that has grown sharply during the second half of the year.

The chart [above] below is based on data from Charles Gaba, a health care analyst who has split the country into 10 equally sized groups. The Trump line refers to the one-tenth of Americans who live in counties that voted most heavily for Trump last year, while the Biden line is the equivalent for the president’s best counties. The line labeled “swing” describes counties where each candidate won at least 45 percent of the votes.

One telling detail is that Covid deaths in both swing counties and heavily Biden counties have not risen over the past two months, even as nationwide case numbers have surged. In heavily vaccinated communities, rising caseloads don’t automatically lead to rising death tolls.

In hundreds of U.S. counties, though, most adults still have not received a Covid vaccine shot. “Just since this summer, 150,000 unvaccinated Americans have needlessly lost their lives despite the widespread availability of vaccines,” Dr. Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, said yesterday.

Vaccine skepticism stems in part from messages on social media and conservative outlets like Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group and talk radio. . . . . They criticize vaccine mandates, sensationalize rare side effects and describe vaccination as a personal choice. They certainly do not deliver the clear message that scientists and Democratic politicians have: Get vaccinated, please, as soon as possible.

The fact that many of conservative pundits are vaccinated themselves would make a pro-vaccine message from them even stronger. . . . Biden, at the White House yesterday, tried his best, saying, “We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death if you’re unvaccinated.”

[M]illions of adults have no immunity, having been neither vaccinated nor infected. . . . .Finally, Omicron appears to be so contagious that even a modest decline in severity — such as the decline estimated in an early analysis from South Africa — could still lead to a large spike in deaths . . . .

For the unvaccinated, however, the best medical advice is clear: Get a shot that may save your life. The question is whether unvaccinated Americans will hear that message from the voices they trust.