Having Neighbors Who Vote for Donald Trump Is Dangerous to Your Health
America's Republicans may not eat their young, but they definitely kill their elderly with the Covid Plague...
America's Republicans may not eat their young, but they definitely kill their elderly with the Covid Plague...
Eric Topol brings the Covid Plague news:
What got my attention was this: Live, after April 2020 (when we recognized what was going on and took steps), in a county where the margin for Trump vs. Biden rises by an extra 1%-point…
…and your chances of dying from the Covid Plague go up by 0.0075%-point:
That means (with an election turnout of half the population) that you only need an additional 67 excess Trump voters in a county to kill one additional person from the Covid Plague.
That really is a lot.
As best as I can tell, the difference is not in non-medical behavioral differentials, but purely in vaccination. And there hangs a tale. Donald Trump got vaccinated in January 2021. Bradley Larsen and company managed to get an extra 100,000 people vaccinated by buying time to show a video about Trump getting vaccinated in 1000 low-vaccine counties in October 2021. Trump got a booster shot before December 20, 2021—and then pleaded with the crowd not to boo him. Presumably he has gotten several more booster thoughts since.
Ron Filipowski tells us that: “In the first major rallies of his post-presidency in 2022, Trump incorporated into his standard speech a few lines about how great the vaccine was and how he should get all the credit for them…” But he got booed and jeered, and then he cut the Warp Speed lines out of his standard speech.
Ron, However, tells us that on March 7, 2024 Trump slithered back into the fray during Biden’s State of the Union Address with:
The response? So far, he has gotten 5,982 replies on Truth Social. If there is a single pro-vaccine one among them, I have not paged down enough to find it. Here are ten of them, selected at random from the current first page of results:
The person who says they have had five close relatives killed by the Covid vaccine is lying; the person who says Covid was no more deadly than the seasonal flu is lying; the person who knows “too many people with turbo cancer because of the jab” is lying; the “my little brother died” person is almost certainly lying; the “two types of vaccines” person is lying; the “DeSantis [signed]… forced vaccinations and involuntary quarantine” person is lying.
The person who says the vaccine is killing thousands and causing a cancer uptick, the “vaccine holocaust” person, the “vaccines have likely killed tens of millions” person, the “Bill Gates” person—they are probably lying, but may just be gullible easily grifted morons who have been misinformed.
The question I do not understand is: Why? What is the financial reward for being one of the grifters here? What is the psychic reward for being an easily grifted moron here? What is the psychic reward for telling lies about non-factual things that never happened to perhaps non-existent relatives here?
References:
Filipowski, Ron. 2024. “Trump Getting DESTROYED on Truth Social Over His Vaccine Post”. Meidas Touch Network. March 8. <https://www.meidastouch.com/news/trump-getting-destroyed-on-truth-social-over-his-vaccine-post>.
Larsen, Bradley; Marc J. Hetherington; Steven H. Greene; Timothy J. Ryan; Rahsaan D. Maxwell; & Steven Tadelis. 2023. “Counter-Stereotypical Messaging & Partisan Cues: Moving the Needle on Vaccines in a Polarized U.S.” <https://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w29896>.
Topol, Eric. 2024. “Covid: 4 Years On”. Ground Truth. March 13.
Wu, Ashley. 2024. “Cumulative U.S. Covid Death Rates”. New York Times. March 11. <https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2024-03-07-ambriefing-4yr-covid-update/4d9f9977-5366-47ee-8ddd-fc898ec3906c/_assets/cumulative-deaths-red-blue-600.png>
"What is the psychic reward for being an easily grifted moron here?" Read Jonathan Metzl's "Dying of Whiteness." People are willing to die (or kill) in the name of social solidarity. (It's sometimes called "patriotism.") And behavior gets particularly janky when the solidarity is constructed from the negation of others' norms. If the wimmins, Jews, and dusky folk believe in public health …
it's a slippery slope from voting for Trump to then becoming an anti-vaxxer. Both require a suspension of disbelief, which is itself a form of belief. And people don't like it when their beliefs are challenged.