Covid Lies Are Still Costing Lives and Harming Kids

With the ongoing controversy involving Spotify's hosting of vaccine deniers and allowing misinformation to be disseminated it's yet another reminder of the deadly cost Republican and right wing partisanship has inflicted on the nation and most ironically the GOP party base.  Despite all of the scientific and medical evidence supporting getting vaccinated and mask wearing, rejecting these lifesaving measures has become a hallmark of being a Republican or, worse yet, a member of the MAGA cult.  And the result is thousands of avoidable deaths and constant turmoil in our schools (Virginia is now deep in the fray thanks to Glenn "Dumbkin" Youngkin's dictat against masks) rather than a laser focus on saving lies and taking measures to end the pandemic as soon as possible.  A column in The Atlantic by a former Republican looks at how partisanship has blinded people, principally on the political right and caused them to reject facts and data and to believe some of the most ridiculous lies - all at a cost to themselves, their communities and their families.  If Covid deaths are not enough of a wake up call to the political right, one has to wonder what can penetrate the blindness caused by their partisanship.  Here are column excerpts:

One of the most important moments of my life was the day in 2016 when I divorced the Republican Party. I didn’t divorce conservatism. I divorced the GOP. It helped change the way I view the world.

No, that didn’t mean I became a Democrat. I didn’t switch jerseys from red to blue. I just took my jersey off and didn’t put another one on. At the time I mainly felt sad, but it was something I was compelled to do—after spending years arguing that personal character wasn’t just an optional aspect of my political ideology but rather essential to the entire enterprise of conservatism, I just couldn’t in good conscience belong to a party that would nominate a man like Donald Trump.

Since my political divorce, however, I’ve been able to see more clearly the nature of partisanship itself, including the way in which it distorts our view of the world. To use a legal analogy, at a fundamental level, partisanship converts a person from a judge (one who decides among competing arguments, hopefully without bias) to a lawyer (one who steadfastly and relentlessly defends their client, almost regardless of the facts).

It’s the lawyer mentality that often leads to the abject hypocrisy and double standards that so often dominate our discourse. Bill Clinton has an affair in the Oval Office? Well, if he’ll lie to his wife, then he’ll lie to you. Donald Trump has an affair with a porn star and pays hush money to keep it out of the news? Then “this thing with Stormy Daniels and so forth is nobody’s business.” Who said such contradictory things? The same man, Franklin Graham, condemning Clinton and, years later, defending Trump.

The operative rule of partisanship is that once any issue becomes partisan, the lawyer model locks in. The two sides double down on their positions, amplify supporting facts, and deny, minimize, or rationalize negative information.

[T]o understand America’s COVID debate, you have to understand that it is often (not always) far more partisan than it is scientific. Red and blue took competing positions on the coronavirus almost from the very onset of the crisis, and those competing visions have distorted debate ever since.

The division is easy to state and readily observable in the real world. From the moment that Donald Trump said—almost exactly two years ago, on January 22, 2020—–that COVID is “one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine,” a pattern was set. Republicans minimized the threat of COVID, and Democrats did the opposite.

I live in Tennessee—in the heart of Red America—and the evidence of Republican risk-benefit analysis is all around me, for good and ill. Despite the reality that one of the most well-documented facts of this pandemic is that vaccines offer profound protection against hospitalization and death, there’s a much higher degree of vaccine refusal here, especially in the rural counties not far from my home.

Vaccine refusal is costing lives. It’s taking a terrible toll, and that toll has hit close to home. It’s cost the lives of people I know, . . . My experience isn’t unusual. I can’t tell you how heartbreaking it is to see person after person fall to a virus when a safe and effective shot would have almost certainly not just saved their life but also likely saved them from even having a serious case of the disease.

The best available evidence demonstrates a dreadful reality: Vaccine reluctance and death rate have correlated with votes for Trump. . . . . People living in counties that went 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.73 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."

By underestimating the threat of COVID, right-leaning Americans made no ordinary political mistake. They made a mistake with life-and-death consequences for hundreds of thousands, and the sadness and grief caused by that mistake is crippling families across the land.

The sad reality is that well before the vaccine, masks became a political and cultural marker. In communities like mine where masking was mostly optional, consistently wearing a mask signaled not just that you were a COVID dissenter, but likely a political dissenter as well. No true member of MAGA nation would wear a “face diaper” (yes, that was common language). For much of the pandemic, you could quickly judge the political composition of a community by the presence or absence of masks. That’s how much partisanship warped our pandemic debate.

So where are we now? All too many partisan COVID “lawyers” are still hard at work. For example, the vaccines themselves (not just mandates) are still up for debate. On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson hosted a COVID-vaccine skeptic . . . . This is dangerous nonsense. But aside from a few notable conservative voices, the right-wing world lets Carlson slide. Why? Because partisans by their very nature focus on the excesses of the other side.

There was a time when we knew so little about COVID that it was easy to make mistakes. And while there is of course still more to learn, we know enough to decisively shed the red and blue biases that have distorted our COVID response for far too long.

Yet we can’t seem to turn the page. Why? Because this I know after a long career in law and a long life as a partisan: Lawyers aren’t as cynical as the public tends to believe, and neither are partisans. They’ve identified so fully and completely with their clients and their positions that they’ve absorbed their position down to the very marrow of their bones. And they’re so committed to victory that any concession is viewed as a surrender to the dark forces that want to destroy our country.

But it’s necessary that more Americans pry themselves away from their partisan identity. We can’t go all in for red or blue. We need more judges and fewer lawyers. Make the partisans convince you. But in the case of COVID, the judgment is already clear. It’s way past time to end COVID partisanship. The fundamental facts of the disease are known. They don’t fully conform to either of America’s competing pandemic narratives, and the longer we cling to either of those narratives, the more we’ll harm the nation—and people—we love.