We’re entering the third year of the pandemic and in the US
the loss of life, month by month, for two years, looks like this.
Altogether more than 900,000 people have died.
But there really are two pandemics here.
Because starting in the spring of 2021
the distribution of the vaccines dramatically changed the nature of the pandemic.
If we look closer at the delta wave and the beginning of omicron
we see the deaths of unvaccinated people were much higher than vaccinated people.
This data comes from a subset of US states and cities that provide immunization data.
While the delta wave did kill some vaccinated people
the risk was 15 times higher if you were unvaccinated.
Philly Baird was one of those unvaccinated people.
And he started going live on his Facebook page from the hospital.
"I love you guys."
"I’m able to talk today."
"Today’s been a great day."
In one of the videos he recommends to his friends and family that they get the vaccine.
Do you think that was a hard thing for him to say?
Yes, because that’s not what he had been communicating, you know, prior to that.
But I think that he would want me to communicate what I know he wanted
and that is for you to look at his situation
and realize that you could possibly get
you could get severe the Covid like he did and be fighting for your life.
And then have a lot of regrets that you didn’t have the vaccine at that time.
"You know I was one of those that sat there and kinda
was more on the political side with Covid and all."
"We gotta put all that aside."
Now when it comes to the political breakdown on vaccinations, there are two things to know.
One is that a majority of Republicans are vaccinated with at least 1 dose
according to the most recent survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The 2nd thing to know is that most unvaccinated Americans are Republican.
So the question is: how does that affect the balance of lives lost?
Well, we can plot the states directly by their 2020 election results
with the red states on the right and the blue states on the left.
And we can look at their death rates since April 2021.
And it's pretty striking.
The Republican states were suffering much bigger losses.
And I want to stress that this relationship wasn’t there before the vaccines.
This is the same chart, but it shows death rates before April 2021.
And they’re much more spread out, with Covid hitting blue states as hard as red ones.
So what I want to understand is the series of events that took us from this... to this.
"The Democrats are in a full-court freak out over coronavirus
after Ted cruz self-isolated after coming into contact..."
Phil Valentine was my younger brother.
A very accomplished radio entertainment personality.
"New York Times even called it the Trump virus."
"Can you imagine if the Ebola virus had been called the Obama virus?"
He was on air in July and you can hear him kind of talking through the symptoms.
"This is my Covid saga."
"And yesterday was probably my worst day and just the shaking and the chills..."
Really processing things on air.
"And as I’ve told you, I’m not judging anybody either way."
"If you want to get the vaccine, it’s a personal health decision."
"I made the decision that I probably wouldn’t die from it."
"Phil would like his listeners to know that he regrets not being more vehemently pro-vaccine."
"He is in the hospital in the critical-care unit..."
He said, you know, I got it wrong.
And then it went from bad to worse.
We know how it all ended.
"We’re all very sad right now at the passing of a friend and a colleague."
"And our thoughts and prayers go out to Susan and the boys at their tremendous loss."
Had he been opposed to other types of vaccines in the past?
Were his or his kids vaccinated with the school vaccines?
He wasn't against anything else?
No.
It’s not obvious that Republicans would be more vaccine hesitant.
Similar percentages of Democrats and Republicans
said they get the flu shot “every year” according to a May 2020 poll.
And in 2019, the Pew Research Center found that
nearly identical shares of Republicans and Democrats
said that the benefits of the vaccinating kids for measles, mumps, and rubella
outweigh the risks.
Republicans were slightly less likely to say they should be required
but it’s nothing like the 30 point gap
that we see in Covid vaccination rates today.
One way to understand that gap is to consider the vastly different information environments
that Republicans and Democrats live in.
This is a list of news sources trusted by at least 40% of Democrats
according to a 2019 survey by Pew.
"... health officials warn..." "... the highest daily rate..."
"... the Covid variant was first reported..."
"... the latest data from the centers..."
And here’s a list of news sources trusted by at least 40% of Republicans.
What this means is that American conservatives are quite exposed to the editorial choices
of a single network.
And on vaccine coverage, that network's choices have been confusing.
"It’s a great vaccine. It’s a safe vaccine."
"It is something that can keep you out of the hospital."
"How many people have been killed or injured by the Covid vaccines?
Does anyone know the answer?"
"If your doctor says you’re ok for it, get it.
It will save your life."
"I got my second dose.
I got a horrific pain in my right eye."
"The vaccine is still working.
It’s still protecting you and those around you."
"Why should you penalize people for not taking a vaccine which doesn’t work?"
"The mRNA covid vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market now.
No one should get them.
No one should get boosted.
No one should get double boosted."
If we compare the information sources of those who said they’d definitely get vaccinated
with the information sources of those who said they would definitely not get vaccinated
we see that the vaccine-resisters were less likely to consume most news sources
except for two:
Fox News and social media.
For 18 hours, I laid in bed dealing with my mortality
and not knowing which way that was going to go.
And I'm laying in bed going, this is my fault.
I should have been listening to doctors and nurses and medical professionals
instead of my political algorithms.
And so is it mostly Facebook where you were getting sort of these messages?
Yes.
I saw some of Fox News reports online.
But, 90 - 95 percent of what I got was through my algorithms and friends on Facebook.
And I can tell you when I started telling people,
you need to consider this vaccine and you need to stop politicizing this.
I lost a lot of friends, and the more hardcore you were...
I had some really ugly things said to me.
And I had to start blocking people that I've been friends with for years.
The Kaiser Family Foundation found that 64% of unvaccinated people
believed at least 4 pieces of Covid-19 misinformation, of the 8 that they tested.
And they found that among those who trusted conservative news outlets
belief in misinformation was more common than among those who trusted other sources.
But we have to remember that this is a correlation.
We don’t know if anti-vax content on TV and Facebook
caused people to turn against the vaccine
or if it was simply pandering to people who had already made up their mind.
It was probably both.
See, one thing I didn’t mention about this chart
is that this data is actually from January 2021.
So most of the anti-vaccine content on these platforms hadn’t been published.
So I went back and searched for the earliest polling I could find.
This is from May of 2020
and it asked people if they would get a hypothetical coronavirus vaccine.
40 percent of Republicans said “definitely not or probably not.”
And that’s pretty much where Republicans are at today, 20 months later.
So what explains why a big chunk of Republican voters had already turned against the vaccine
six months before the presidential election
and nearly a year before the vaccines were even available?
I think the answer is somewhere in here.
Of the 8 false claims polled by the Kaiser Family Foundation
the one most widely believed wasn’t about the vaccines at all.
And so of the different pieces of misinformation we tested, the most commonly believed overall
and particularly by Republicans
was this idea that the government was inflating the number of deaths due to Covid-19.
"Top US health officials are rejecting President Trump’s suggestion that the US coronavirus
case and death totals are 'fake news'."
"He said a couple of hours ago the number of cases and deaths of the China virus..."
"... are quote 'far exaggerated'."
That claim was based on a misunderstanding of how death certificates work
but it was extremely potent.
If you’ve been told not to trust the death count, how do you assess your own risk?
And why would you take action to protect yourself and your family?
If we compare unvaccinated republicans with their vaccinated counterparts
the biggest difference between them isn’t that the unvaccinated ones are younger or
more conservative or more rural
although they are
it’s the pervasiveness of the belief
that seriousness of the coronavirus is generally exaggerated.
And that idea that the pandemic has been made into a bigger deal than it really is
has been an overarching belief for a majority of Republicans.
Even as Covid became one of the leading causes of death in the US
even as the virus shifted from cities to rural America.
And that takes us back to the very first weeks of the pandemic.
When the virus found a United States under an exceptionally polarizing president
and at the start of an election year.
"We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine."
"Joe Biden calling him the worst possible person to lead our country through virus."
"Well we pretty much shut it down coming in from China."
"President Trump has no plan, no urgency, no understanding of the facts."
"If the coronavirus ends up having a real impact on the economy
it could tip the election to the—"
"Democrats and their media cronies have decided to weaponize fear
to improve their chances against Trump in November."
In the early stages of the pandemic, you got this very large polarization around things
like lockdowns, mask wearing, and the severity of the pandemic itself.
Just how seriously to take this.
"Trump supported anti-lockdown protests..."
"Liberate Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia."
"...states led be Democratic governors."
"President Trump without a mask..."
"Defiance in the face of adversity..."
"Joe Biden wearing one."
"...an image of trepidation, even fear."
"Making for a splitscreen campaign moment."
And it seems that rank and file Republicans, largely on their own, figured out that if
you don’t take the pandemic seriously, why would you get vaccinated?
You know the people telling you to do it, they’re not trustworthy.
And so, you know, flash forward to spring of 2021 and you get this weird paradox where
most Republican politicians are vaccinated
but they're saying stuff at the same time to cater to
to anti-vaccine sentiment in their base
and now there's real political downside to promoting vaccination for a lot of these folks.
"...your freedoms, I do.
You have to do what you have to do."
"But! I recommend take the vaccines."
"I did it. It's good."
"Take the vaccines."
"But you got — no that's okay, that's alright."
"You've got your freedoms..."
Let me tell you how I make sense of what happened to your brother
and I want to get your reaction.
I see Phil looking at the data
concluding that his risk of dying from Covid was low.
But I think his brain was sort of pushed in the direction of that conclusion by signals
that were sent really early on in the pandemic by Trump and Fox and others that
Republicans kind of think this coronavirus is overblown.
The polarization starts there.
Then by the time the vaccines come out
Phil's not getting clear, consistent signals from the people that he trusts
that it's time to update his risk calculation and go ahead and get that vaccine.
And then he gets hit by the beginning of the delta wave.
Does that seem accurate to you?
That's on the right track, I think that that...
The calculus changed when the delta variant presented itself because it attacked a much
younger segment of the population.
Then all of a sudden, politics starts to enter into the thing.
We already we've just come off of being lied to for three years straight
that Trump was a Russian agent, a traitor to the country.
So I think that that was that people looked askance at that whole messaging system.
The underlying problem is that there are two diametrically opposed views
of what America should be like in this world
and one is held by one side and one is held by the other
so you decide which one you’re going to be on.
You get into this situation where elite politicians in the respective parties feel like they have
to polarize on the issue
because their base expects them to disagree with the other party.
It would have helped a great deal of the elites of the political leaders of our country had
coordinated across party lines
and laid out a unified message at the beginning
I definitely think we could have largely mitigated the polarized responses
that we saw in the mass public.
What do you hope for, what do you fear, when it comes to
polarization around public health issues?
One of the things I really worry about going forward is
what we’d like is reduced polarization around Covid vaccination
especially as we move into a possible regular regime of boosting going forward.
But what I think might be more likely if we aren't really, really effective and proactive
on reducing that polarization
is that polarization around Covid vaccination persists and spreads to other vaccines like
measles, mumps, rubella.
And sure enough, researchers at UC San Diego tracked vaccine attitudes
from March to August 2021
and they found that not only were the Republicans in their study more likely to turn against
the Covid vaccine as the year went on
they also ended up with declining attitudes about vaccines in general
and lower intentions to get the flu shot next year.
Which means the health consequences of pandemic polarization could extend well beyond Covid-19.