As a Democrat, this sort of paper appeals to "my team". Which makes me suspect it lacks the Mertonian Norm of "disinterestedness". To your point, they could have made this about vaccination levels, but that wouldn't get as much attention. Political Science is not Science. Interesting note about my home state of Ohio voter registration, I didn't think of that confounder yet.
This nonsense has been regurgitated dozens of times (David Leonhardt in the NYT had this a recurring column for a while), and the flaws are always the same - they do a poor job controlling for age which makes me suspect they data drudged or p-hacked their age regression just enough until they saw the result they hoped for. Why not run this same analysis on all cause mortality in 2019, 2017, or 2005? Would they find the same thing?
Of course they would. People in rural areas have higher rates of death than their urban counterparts. CDC writes on this: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p0112-rural-death-risk.html This doesn't even get into the aspect of access to emergency care, as your odds of surviving heart attacks, ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysms, car accidents, and strokes are vastly better when you live in blue cities and the Cleveland Clinic is a 15 minute drive instead of a multi hour transfer via ambulance to regional hospital to airlift.
Now suddenly we forget all of those confounders? We forget that Florida entered the pandemic coming off 9,740 deaths per million compared to California's 6,830/million in 2019? Was that gap because Florida votes Republican too?
Is South Korea, one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, seeing the largest all-cause mortality spike in the world in 2022 because of DeSantis? (Seriously, look at this, should be around 175K deaths so far in 2022 but already at 216K!) https://imgur.com/a/lj0cVxt
I deliberately did not link Leonhardt. Usually, his sin is cherry-picking time periods and not age-adjusting (but mainly the time periods thing -- I notice he goes away w/ his graphs when COVID sweeps through the NY area again...then he comes back when the wave moves south again)
What is grimly amusing to me is that of course almost all the anti-vaxxers I personally know are Democrats... because I live in New York. It's a sampling thing. I'm surrounded by Dems. Of course all the unvaxxed people I know are Dems, because pretty much all the people I know here are Dems except for the few people on the local Republican committee with me. But most of those people are old, so they all got vaccinated. I've mainly found a link not to partisanship among people I know, but age, convenience to get the vaccine, their own health problems, and neuroticism. But that's because there's not much difference in their partisanship.
In any case, it has made it very difficult for me to try to convince anybody of anything, because something that should not have been politicized has become deeply so. So I make my little graphs and hope to find patterns in geography, seasonality, etc.
As a Democrat, this sort of paper appeals to "my team". Which makes me suspect it lacks the Mertonian Norm of "disinterestedness". To your point, they could have made this about vaccination levels, but that wouldn't get as much attention. Political Science is not Science. Interesting note about my home state of Ohio voter registration, I didn't think of that confounder yet.
This nonsense has been regurgitated dozens of times (David Leonhardt in the NYT had this a recurring column for a while), and the flaws are always the same - they do a poor job controlling for age which makes me suspect they data drudged or p-hacked their age regression just enough until they saw the result they hoped for. Why not run this same analysis on all cause mortality in 2019, 2017, or 2005? Would they find the same thing?
Of course they would. People in rural areas have higher rates of death than their urban counterparts. CDC writes on this: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p0112-rural-death-risk.html This doesn't even get into the aspect of access to emergency care, as your odds of surviving heart attacks, ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysms, car accidents, and strokes are vastly better when you live in blue cities and the Cleveland Clinic is a 15 minute drive instead of a multi hour transfer via ambulance to regional hospital to airlift.
Liberals have been dunking on the poor health of Republicans long before Covid, pointing out their higher rates of obesity, sick days, smoking, lethargy, etc. Like here https://extranewsfeed.com/whos-healthier-republicans-or-democrats-21dce4811bfa
Now suddenly we forget all of those confounders? We forget that Florida entered the pandemic coming off 9,740 deaths per million compared to California's 6,830/million in 2019? Was that gap because Florida votes Republican too?
Is South Korea, one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, seeing the largest all-cause mortality spike in the world in 2022 because of DeSantis? (Seriously, look at this, should be around 175K deaths so far in 2022 but already at 216K!) https://imgur.com/a/lj0cVxt
What a disgrace.
I deliberately did not link Leonhardt. Usually, his sin is cherry-picking time periods and not age-adjusting (but mainly the time periods thing -- I notice he goes away w/ his graphs when COVID sweeps through the NY area again...then he comes back when the wave moves south again)
What is grimly amusing to me is that of course almost all the anti-vaxxers I personally know are Democrats... because I live in New York. It's a sampling thing. I'm surrounded by Dems. Of course all the unvaxxed people I know are Dems, because pretty much all the people I know here are Dems except for the few people on the local Republican committee with me. But most of those people are old, so they all got vaccinated. I've mainly found a link not to partisanship among people I know, but age, convenience to get the vaccine, their own health problems, and neuroticism. But that's because there's not much difference in their partisanship.
In any case, it has made it very difficult for me to try to convince anybody of anything, because something that should not have been politicized has become deeply so. So I make my little graphs and hope to find patterns in geography, seasonality, etc.
And deal with crappy data sets.