There are Republicans who are getting sick — and even dying — as some sort of distorted political stance. This is how we got here.
Roughly nine months into his presidency, however, red states and blue states have widely diverged on what should be the least political of issues: Vaccination rates for Covid-19.
“The political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state. … Because the vaccines are so effective at preventing serious illness, Covid deaths are also showing a partisan pattern. Covid is still a national crisis, but the worst forms of it are increasingly concentrated in red America.”
More than 9 in 10 self-identified Democrats (92%) report that they have had at least one dose of one of the three vaccines for Covid-19. That number among Republicans? Just 56%.
That’s a stunning data point that tells a very clear story: there are Republicans who are getting seriously ill — and even dying — as some sort of distorted political stance.
How did we get here? There’s no single person to blame, but in my mind it’s quite clear that former President Donald Trump and Fox News bear the lion’s share of the responsibility.
Trump spent the first 16 months of the pandemic doing everything he could to downplay it. He insisted that the virus was “going to disappear.” He was openly dismissive of mask-wearing; on the day he announced CDC guidance that people should wear masks indoors, Trump said that he had no plans to do so. “I just don’t want to be doing — I don’t know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, the great Resolute Desk,” Trump explained. “I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just, I just don’t.”
Trump also worked to make the debate about masking — and steps to mitigate Covid-19 more generally — about attempts by Democratic leaders to limit your freedoms. Lockdown orders were an abrogation of your rights — as opposed to short-term attempts to slow community spread of the virus. Masks were nanny government trying to tell you what to do. Respected experts — most notably Dr. Anthony Fauci — were shills for the Democratic Party. Everything, in short, that people other than Donald Trump was telling you about the virus was bunk.
(That Trump was booed when he told a crowd earlier this year to get vaccinated tells you everything you need to know about the danger of fomenting distrust and feeding people lies.)
This isn’t complicated. We are not just divided along political lines now. Our political divisions have created two entirely different Americas: One in which the vast majority of people are vaccinated and hospitalizations and deaths are low, and the other where the coronavirus continues to ravage the population.
