Morning folks, time for my first Mastodon thread (!)
Ahead of the #midterms tomorrow, I want to talk about the tragic politicisation of science in the US.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the Republicans became the anti-science party, but the process probably began in the 1980s, when the Christian right first emerged as a major force in conservative American politics.
Since then, the journey has been smooth and swift, and there is now a stunning partisan divide on confidence in science 😥
It would be easy to dismiss this trend as merely exasperating — a source of irritation at family gatherings — but over the past 18 months, this partisan divide may have cost as many as 60,000 American lives
This is the stark implication of a study by @paulgp and others, which found that since Covid vaccines became widely available, the mortality rate of registered Republicans in Ohio and Florida climbed by 33% during America’s winter Covid wave last year, compared with just 10% among Democrats
Excess death rates were already higher among Republicans before vaccines came online, possibly due to red states taking a more lax stance on social distancing etc, but once vaccines came on line, the gap widened dramatically 📈
And to be clear, this is after adjusting for age, so it can’t be explained by Republicans simply being older on average. This is the result of a party and its voters turning away from science
To be fair, anti-vax attitudes are hardly confined to the US and to Republicans.
People who voted for the populist right-wing AfD party in Germany were also more vaccine-sceptic than most, as were supporters of populist parties in France.
But the breadth and depth of anti-vax attitudes in those countries and parties was far less than what we see with the Republicans in the US.
@jburnmurdoch While comparing the Republican party to AfD and Front National is already not putting the GOP in a very favourable light, I think there's an issue of causality here.
In Europe, the mechanism is largely that people with anti-science believes vote for anti-science parties, as they reflect their attitudes. In the US, I fear this is reversed: People hold anti-science believes because they vote for an anti science party. This makes the harm caused by the GOP so much greater.
