Thread by @donmoyn

New from me: The partisan Covid gap is worsening. Research using careful causal designs show that media messaging, in the form of Fox News, is leading Republicans to take the pandemic less seriously, resist vaccines, get sick and die. 1/
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/fox-news-is-…

Conservatives are more resistant to public health measures in general. We can see this in other countries. But the left-right gap is two-to-four times as large in the US as it is in other countries according to this Pew survey. 2/
pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021…

As vaccines have become more easily accessible, Republicans have become the largest group holdout group. As a result, deaths in the Trumpiest parts of the US are more than 5 times higher than in the bluest counties (h/t @charles_gaba) 3/
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/fox-news-is-…

Unvaxxed Republican are less likely to believe that COVID is a big deal, and more likely to believe conspiracy theories, like the idea vaccines include microchips. 96% of them think that vaccines are a matter of personal choice, rather than a collective responsibility. 4/

Given the extreme nature of US conservative views about COVID, and the fact that it is a relatively new issue where people did not have strong prior beliefs, it seems reasonable to assume that elite and media messaging matters. Which brings us to Fox News. 5/

Social scientists spend much time trying to determine causality: i.e., whether Fox is driving the beliefs of its audience or merely catering to them. This is hard to sort out. A standard technique to do so is to look at channel position as a source of exogenous variation. 6/

What do these studies find? That being exposed to Fox News has a causal effect on COVID health behaviors and outcomes, making people less likely to isolate, use health products like masks, trust vaccines, and more likely to get sick and die. 6/ donmoynihan.substack.com/p/fox-news-is-…

It's bad that a lot of Americans are dying because they trust the bad public health messaging of Fox and other elites.

Even if you don't care about Fox viewers, the nature of the pandemic means we are all in the same boat. Its just that some people are trying to sink it. 7/