Covidiot Counties

If you needed more proof that being Pro-Trump also means being Pro-COVID, look no further than this NPR study.

Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates

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 2.73 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.

This is even more striking — and also not one bit surprising. The GOP really has cemented its status as a death cult.

Recent polling shows that partisanship is now this single strongest identifying predictor of whether someone is vaccinated. Polling also shows that mistrust in official sources of information and exposure to misinformation, about both COVID-19 and the vaccines, run high among Republicans.

“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.”

This country is absolutely fucked. Truly, it is. And because of these COVID-loving shitmonkeys, the virus will keep killing us for decades.

I’m starting to feel that a doomsday asteroid would actually be doing us a favor…