Politics and Medical Science; Politics and Deaths

 A recent article in The Economist discusses the manner in which political polarization has spread to the treatment of medical science and medical scientists.  It was titled “Red and blue science” in the paper issue, but has changed to America’s culture wars extend into medicine for the online version.  The party issues have been greatly influenced by the Covid pandemic and the contentious responses of scientific experts and politicians.  The article focuses on the activities in Florida where the governor, Ron DeSantis, has made deriding medical experts a political ploy.  What is of interest here is the data presented on the confidence US citizens have in their medical hierarchy that compares Republicans and Democrats.  Data on the flu vaccination rates for members of the two parties are also presented.

Consider the confidence data.

 Except for a burst of excess confidence by Republicans in the 1980s, the attitudes of the parties have been reasonably consistent in drifting downward over several decades.  With the coming of the pandemic, the confidence expressed appears to have a distinct political component with Democrats seemingly plateaued or perhaps gaining confidence.  Meanwhile, the confidence of Republicans continues to fall.

The point to make from this data is not that one side understands the issues better than the other; the point is that a politicized lack of confidence in medical experts has consequences.  Consider the data on flu vaccination rates by party.

Democratic vaccinations are slowly increasing while the Republican vaccination rate is following the politics and drifting downward.

The article ends with this conclusion.

“All this has real consequences. Republican voters are less likely to get a covid-19 booster. They have also become more hesitant about other vaccines, including flu shots…An outbreak of measles in Ohio in November and December seemed entirely caused by unvaccinated children. ‘We haven’t had politicised epidemics before,’ says Robert Blendon, at Harvard University. ‘There were never Republican views of polio, or H1N1 or smallpox, and Democrat views’.”

Political views on medical science can have medical consequences.  There are people out there trying to tally what those consequences might be.  Consider Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the Covid-19 Pandemic.  This document was produced by Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason L. Schwartz for the National Bureau of Economic Research.  They have provided interesting conclusions.

“Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19, amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democrat- leaning counties and evidence of a link between political party affiliation and vaccination views. This study constructs an individual-level dataset with political affiliation and excess death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic via a linkage of 2017 voter registration in Ohio and Florida to mortality data from 2018 to 2021.”

Concern that all deaths attributable to Covid are not recorded as such leads medical experts to lean towards excess total death increases relative to a pre-pandemic time period as a more accurate Covid death tally.

“We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Post- vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.”

 We are a country where the political parties are nearly evenly divided.  Each national election has results where individual campaigns are decided by a handful of votes.  Presidential campaigns are decided by thousands of votes in states where millions have voted.  Yet the Republicans are pursuing a strategy that impugns medical experts and denies any notion that vaccines should be necessary.  In so doing, they are losing voters via unnecessarily higher death rates relative to those of Democratic voters.

So, the Republicans have yet another demographic problem, one of their own making.

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.