SIO343: Excess Republican COVID Deaths Are Massive. But Not Surprising.
Serious Inquiries Only
Thomas Smith
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2022
⏱️ 48 minutes
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Summary
Science denialism kills. Anti-vax conspiracy theory kills. This was obvious. But what are the numbers? How many more Republicans died of COVID than might have anyway? A new study has done a rigorous job answering that question, and the answer is grim. Very grim.
Links: Wallace et al. (2022) Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Pink et al. (2021) Vaccine endorsement from Republican leaders increases vaccine intentions in Republicans, Allcott et al (2020) Partisan differences in social distancing and transmission rates, KFF poll on partisan gap in COVID-19 vaccination status, Estimates of unnecessary deaths due to unvaccinated adults (Brown School of Public Health)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, and welcome to Series Inquiries. Only this is episode 343. I'm Thomas. That's Dr. Lindsay |
| 0:19.5 | Osterman, professional co-host. How are you doing? I'm fantastic. A little sedentary today, |
| 0:24.2 | honestly, but otherwise okay. Yeah. How are you? Oh, I'm sedentary because it's a day that |
| 0:29.2 | ends in day. That was a little dead, your deli of ends and why? I guess it makes more sense. |
| 0:35.8 | But despite being sedentary, did get my own macron booster a few weeks ago? So feel pretty good |
| 0:41.2 | about that. Oh, nice. Yeah. I got mine, yeah, longer ago than that because you know, I'm just more |
| 0:46.0 | into science and medicine. Okay. All right. So yeah, this recording is good. No, I jumped on it |
| 0:53.9 | right away. It was one of those ones where like it wasn't even displaying in my Kaiser app. |
| 0:58.8 | Again, every time I mentioned my health insurance, anyone who doesn't know Kaiser's such a mystery |
| 1:03.5 | to Eli's joke about it too on the other show. But anyway, yeah, it was like not even available in |
| 1:08.1 | the app, but then like I was waiting and watching. It was like refreshing like I was trying to buy a |
| 1:11.7 | PlayStation 5, you know, and then I saw it all of a sudden. I was like, yeah, get jump on it now. |
| 1:16.4 | So I got it right away. I think one Phoebe Smith can get a third shot. So the first booster maybe |
| 1:22.9 | is available for kids. Nice. I'm not sure because well, I have the youngest group of kids, right? Two |
| 1:28.0 | to five. So they're like two shots behind us, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Good news. Hey, is |
| 1:33.6 | that it all related to what we're going to talk about today in any way? No idea what you're talking |
| 1:37.3 | about. No. Are we just making casual but natural conversation? Yeah. Yeah. PSA everybody get your |
| 1:44.8 | boosters turns out to be important. But how could you know that? Is there some way we could possibly |
| 1:50.6 | measure any of those outcomes scientifically? Yeah. There's like a whole method and it's really |
| 1:55.3 | scientific. There is. Yeah. Why don't you tell us all about it? So we are talking about a paper |
| 2:01.6 | that came out very recently. You set this to me. It's called excess death rates for Republicans |
| 2:07.2 | and Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic. So they're leaving a little mystery as to which way |
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