TOTALLY NOT A DEATH CULT:

Despite early wide-scale access to COVID-19 vaccines, the U.S. has outstripped its peer countries when it comes to the all-important measure of mortality known as "excess deaths." Meanwhile, U.S. life expectancy has continued to drop dramatically due to the coronavirus even as longevity measures have begun rebounding elsewhere. [...]

• When it comes to the public's beliefs about the pandemic, such as whether there should be more or fewer COVID restrictions, the gap between left- and right-leaning voters has been much higher in the U.S. than elsewhere.

• COVID cases and deaths are higher in more Republican counties.

• Republicans are more likely to believe misinformation about vaccines.

• Republicans are substantially less likely to get vaccinated.

• Researchers have found that exposure to conservative media, particularly Fox News, made people more vaccine hesitant.

This body of evidence had some limitations, though. For instance, the fact that red counties tended to have higher death rates than blue ones might not mean that conservatives were more likely to die from COVID if lots of Democrats who happened to live in right-wing parts of the country were perishing too. Or, if more Republicans were dying, it might also be because they were different from Democrats in ways that affect COVID outcomes but were not directly driven by ideology. They might just be older, in worse health, or in a community with poorer health resources, for example.

Recently, however, a new working paper by three Yale public health and economics researchers--Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason Schwartz--is offering the most definitive and direct evidence I've seen yet confirming that Republicans have indeed been more likely to die because of COVID. The study, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, also confirms the scale of these deaths and points to the central role vaccine hesitancy has likely played in the tragedy.

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