The Vaccinated Protect the Unvaccinated

If 234 000 deaths from COVID-19 could have been prevented with a primary series of vaccinations (https://bit.ly/3XrFXfz) between June 2021 and March 2022, I estimate that 140 400 of these deaths would have been among Republicans. This is, of course, not a surprise because Republicans are less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats, and, as the Texas Department of Health put it, “Texas Data Shows Unvaccinated People 20 times More Likely to Die From COVID-19” (https://bit.ly/3H0ACog). The Republicans die at higher rates than Democrats mostly in counties with low vaccination rates.

This is not a study based on county-level statistics, which are often tricky to interpret in terms of causal relation. The authors have linked individual-level information both on mortality from 2018 to 2021 and on political affiliation from 2017 voter registration in Ohio and Florida.

In the current state of tension between the most vocal and extremist faction of the Republican party and Democrats, some people may think: if COVID-19 kills Republicans, why should we care? The answer is very clear. Such reasoning is incompatible with the public health approach. Public health needs to be all-inclusive to succeed. Viruses do not sense political affiliation. The overmortality among Republicans stems from sectors of the population being unvaccinated. This has translated into a longer duration of the pandemic, more new variants, more deaths, more school closures, small businesses filing for bankruptcy, and misery for everyone. The response to a public health emergency is either successfully collective, or it fails. A striking finding of the NBER study is that in the counties with at least 50% of the population vaccinated, there were no excess death differences between Republicans and Democrats. The vaccinated protected the unvaccinated.