We all intuitively sensed it and it more than made sense. With the vaccine now readily available, COVID has become a disease of the unvaccinated and the counties that voted for Trump are the counties that are less likely to be vaccinated.

They are the ones that watch Tucker, Hannity, and others, that question the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. But with science, intuitive “beliefs” don’t cut it, it takes a study of the type that NPR did, where they accounted for variables like age and other non-political factors. The results are stunning:

NPR looked at deaths per 100,000 people in roughly 3,000 counties across the U.S. from May 2021, the point at which vaccinations widely became available. People living in counties that went 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.78 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.

In October, the reddest tenth of the country saw death rates that were six times higher than the bluest tenth, according to Charles Gaba, an independent health care analyst who’s been tracking partisanship trends during the pandemic and helped to review NPR’s methodology. Those numbers have dropped slightly in recent weeks, Gaba says: “It’s back down to around 5.5 times higher.”

Part of it is due to the fact that people who watch Right-Wing television are less likely to know that the delta variant is far more lethal and contagious to people who are younger, meaning the 30 to 60 year olds that used to believe that they had nothing to fear from COVID learned, all too late, that they did.

And again, it played out in the data:

“An unvaccinated person is three times as likely to lean Republican as they are to lean Democrat,” says Liz Hamel, vice president of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy think tank that tracks attitudes toward vaccination. Political affiliation is now the strongest indicator of whether someone is vaccinated, she says: “If I wanted to guess if somebody was vaccinated or not and I could only know one thing about them, I would probably ask what their party affiliation is.

We felt it, we saw it on maps and read that states which voted for Trump had health systems that were failing and we’re now seeing it in scientific studies.

It will not change until the people until the message changes and the people who receive that message believe it and get vaccinated.

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