Thread by @JamesSurowiecki

New study of almost 600,000 deaths in Ohio and Florida shows that registered Republicans had far higher excess-death rates than registered Democrats during the pandemic, with almost all of the gap coming after vaccines were available.
nber.org/system/files/w…

@_Kodos_ @politicalmath Vaccination rates for the elderly in American red states were much lower than vax rates in the UK - 10-15 points lower. So the unvaxxed elderly, and unvaxxed <65, accounted for a much higher percentage of total deaths here.

@AmyBeePhoenix @_Kodos_ @politicalmath The county data is suggestive of what's obviously true, namely that differences in vax rates explain the widening of the excess-death gap in 2021. But it's the documentation of the fact that that gap was small in 2020, and widened dramatically post-vax, that is most important.

@SwedenTeam Anyway, the data on vax rates by race aren't reliable enough to make fine-grained distinctions. What we know is that black and white vax rates are in the same ballpark, Latino rates are higher, and Asian vax rates are very high.

@ZetaReticulon @OxfordJo70 The 2nd and 3rd waves in Northeastern states with high vax rates, for instance, were much lower than the 1st wave. That obviously would not have happened had the vaccines been killing people.

@EduEngineer "We do not observe a statistically significant association between the county-level vaccination rate and the Republican-Democrat excess death gap until after the vaccine is widely available."

@EduEngineer It's only after the vaccines become available that Republicans start dying in far greater numbers than Democrats. And again, these are excess deaths, not just raw Covid deaths, so the study is already controlling, to some degree, for health/wealth effects in death rates.