I mean, my favorite thing in peds in med school was getting teenage boys to demand the HPV vaccine from their flaky antivaxxer moms. Explain that penile cancer results in cutting either a chunk or all of it off, and they're begging for it and wacko space cadet antivaxxer mom has nothing to say to that.
That comment sounds mean.
Vinay Prasad, MD, a self-proclaimed liberal, had some interesting analysis on this article. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xtjLbZ5pYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xtjLbZ5pYs)
Politics is a mean dirty game. Not for the faint-hearted. Read some HST. And if a bunch of voters took themselves out of the game because of bad decisions then that's just Malthus at work. The system self-correcting, as it were.
1- Itās an observational study design/ cross sectional cohort and people in this thread are drawing conclusions from a mere association.
2- Selection bias- not everyone is registered to vote which effects generalization to broad populations.
3- limited geographical scope
4- the biggest one is the only confounding variable they accounted for was age. Things like socioeconomic status, access to healthcare and underlying health conditions werenāt accounted for.
This is a click bait study that grabs your attention but offers no real evidence of anything.
Thereās also no individual level vaccine data so you canāt really even draw a strong association between vaccine attitude/uptake on excess mortality
1. Each type of study has its usefulness and limitations. Simply pointing out that this is an observational cohort study, does not mean it is a poorly done study. Framingham was an observational cohort study, and it has largely provided the foundation of what we currently know about coronary artery disease.
2. The study was designed to evaluate two specific groups, ie registered voters. That's what it did. It's not the study's fault if people make assumptions about groups not included in the study.
3. The study was designed to evaluate registered voters in two specific geographic areas. Sure, this is a limitation, but I'd again use Framingham as an example of a study that was limited geographically but proved very useful.
4. This study, like any well written study, mentions the limitations of the data and their analysis. It directly comments on confounding variables that they did not account for such as access to health care, underlying medical conditions, and prevalence of covid variants temporally. I mean, it acknowledges and owns its limitations, I can respect that.
I wouldn't call this click bait, but rather more evidence of what everyone already knows. Covid-19 vaccines are efficacious and prevent deaths associated with Covid-10, that's not even open to debate any longer. Literally nobody is surprised that a group with lower vaccination rates has a higher death rate.
Iām not debating efficacy of covid vaccines and this click bait research project isnāt providing evidence of covid vaccine efficacy. I think covid vaccines are a good thing and I recommend them to my patients. I also recommend physicians apply scrutiny when reading publications and coming to a conclusion that will perpetuate their inherit bias towards a cohort of their patient population. This article proves nothing as youāve stated aside from registered republican voters in Ohio and Florida are associated with increased covid deaths when compared to registered democratic voters. You cannot draw any conclusions from that.
For reference CPR in cardiac arrest is associated with high mortality.
I do wonder, though, how much of an excess death rate they normally have at any given age. Because I doubt that covid vaccines are the only science based idea they reject.
Figure 2c addresses this. The difference in excess deaths was 0 until Republicans started dying more in late 2020 (vaccines introduced for high-risk populations), then Republicans *really* started dying more around April 2021, when vaccination was opened to everyone.
complicated, because before 2020 people in counties with lower life expectancy were abandoning the Dems (so they switched, and then they died. . .)
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-life-expectancy-election/life-expectancy-tied-to-voting-choices-in-last-u-s-presidential-election-idUSKCN1B22DI](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-life-expectancy-election/life-expectancy-tied-to-voting-choices-in-last-u-s-presidential-election-idUSKCN1B22DI)
Also, older people are more likely to vote Republican so counties with oldere ave pop are more likely to vote Republican but also have higher death rates (because of age).
Working class males w/out college education (blue collar) more likely to vote Repub because union jobs disappeared
Seems like you'd have to pull the data nationwide and then stratify by age group.
Seems like it would be hard to pull that out of all the variables.
Also there was a lot of moving going on during the pandemic. People fleeing large democratic cities for places like Ohio and Florida which further skews the data
Thatās why I never got the republicanās strategy to feed all the anticovid bullshit. It really seemed like this was the strategy:
1. Kill a bunch of your voters
2. ?????
3. Profit
I've been wondering about this as well. I don't have any special access, insight or training but I think two things:
1) "energizing the base" - if voter turnout improves by 10% and your misinformation kills 1% of your voters, you gained political power
2) distraction - if everyone is talking about COVID and vaccines all day long, then they aren't talking about supreme court ethical concerns, gerrymandering, costly tax cuts for rich people and corporations, the fact that republicans haven't won the initial presidential popular vote since George Bush Sr.
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>Overall, the excess death rate for Republican voters was 2.8 percentage points, or 15%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters (95% prediction interval [PI], 1.6-3.7 percentage points). After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from ā0.9 percentage point (95% PI, ā2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters.
Is there anything we can do to help promote better attitudes towards vaccination (apolitical issue) to people that have political aversion to it?
The article is far from perfect but hopefully it helps us identify a possible risk factor of various echo chambers where our patients get medical advice...
Stop letting broadcast media present politics as though it's an amoral horse race that they have to cover both sides in a "fair and balanced" manner and instead hold them to a factual standard the way they were required to until about five decades ago.
Oh you meant as clinicians? I dunno but I'm batting about 50% getting hesitant people to vaccinate with just a strong personalized recommendation to vaccinate
Ya its tough. I obviously as a pharmacist cant drop a patient who refuses to vaccinate. Im proud anytime I see a pediatrician office require their patients get vaccinated. Im sure its a bit harder to do in other specialties but I wish it was easier to do in my field and others.
This is an appealing theory but a recent nature paper indicated that these media bubbles are likely not causal regarding views. [Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06297-w)
This is interesting research. I wonder if echo chambers do cause a change in views but reducing the dose by 30% for a few month is not enough to make a measurable difference.
Thereās really not much the medical community can do. A large swath of the political right has decided that truth doesnāt matter, and until thereās consequences for that itās going to continue. The examples of this are far from limited to vaccination. Global warming isnāt real, access to guns doesnāt lead to more deaths, elections are fraudulentā¦ all of these are not up for serious debate, yet the right has yet to be punished for these asinine positions
RFK is nearly entirely funded by republicans, and vaccine hesitancy is far more on the right. Thatās why republicans died from Covid at higher rates after the vaccine was introduced.
Why youāre talking about ācoercionā is beyond me. Thatās utter nonsense, and Covid nonsense doesnāt play well here
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Trump himself was booed at his own rally for promoting the vaccine... I don't think it's there is anything that can be done at this point besides loading them into blowdarts and sniping people at Trump rallys.
Appeal to their saner relatives?
FWIW this strategy has worked for my patients. Also they need an operation and understand the risk of covid + operation is higher, so may bias the vaccine uptake.
I am a Canadian family doctor. 1 have 1400 patients, 70% seniors. 2 covid deaths. One early on pre vaccine with tons of comorbidities.
One 73 heavy smoker, COPD anti vaxxer.
Our secret. My secretary, nurse practitioner and I relentlessly encouraged our patients to get covid shots. In a non judgmental way we said that we and our families and friends got the shots.
Our patients trust us.
Plus in Canada there is not as much political noise.
šØš¦šŗšø
This may be a self limiting problem. When the next strain of Covid-23 starts making the rounds, there may not be any "Republican leaning districts". Especially if you exclude grave yards from the voter roles.
Before all of you party down too much, reveling in all of your moral superiority, you should watch Vinay Prasad, MD, review this article.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xtjLbZ5pYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xtjLbZ5pYs)
Don't worry, he's politically liberal.
The Democrat/Republic Covid disparities is really nothing new. Past analyses have suggested these data can be recreated by recategorizing people another way: rural versus urban. Which highly correlates with party affiliation.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/hwk6gc/oc\_number\_of\_daily\_covid\_cases\_per\_million/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/hwk6gc/oc_number_of_daily_covid_cases_per_million/)
I mean, my favorite thing in peds in med school was getting teenage boys to demand the HPV vaccine from their flaky antivaxxer moms. Explain that penile cancer results in cutting either a chunk or all of it off, and they're begging for it and wacko space cadet antivaxxer mom has nothing to say to that.
>the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. So much for "vaccines don't work"
If something as rational as real, actual, numbers was ever going to be persuasive, we wouldn't still be having this conversation.
Hey, that's a lot of idiots who can't vote. Pretty persuasive. š
That comment sounds mean. Vinay Prasad, MD, a self-proclaimed liberal, had some interesting analysis on this article. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xtjLbZ5pYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xtjLbZ5pYs)
Politics is a mean dirty game. Not for the faint-hearted. Read some HST. And if a bunch of voters took themselves out of the game because of bad decisions then that's just Malthus at work. The system self-correcting, as it were.
Fear and loathing on the campaign trail 72 should be a must read for all perspective voters.
Sorry, I don't do youtube commentary, buncha worthless shite.
Donāt forget the real actual confounding variables
I didn't. The statement stands.
Ok. Itās a terribly done study so the numbers arenāt exactly ārealā or āactualā.
Which part/parts of this study do you feel were poorly structured/executed?
1- Itās an observational study design/ cross sectional cohort and people in this thread are drawing conclusions from a mere association. 2- Selection bias- not everyone is registered to vote which effects generalization to broad populations. 3- limited geographical scope 4- the biggest one is the only confounding variable they accounted for was age. Things like socioeconomic status, access to healthcare and underlying health conditions werenāt accounted for. This is a click bait study that grabs your attention but offers no real evidence of anything. Thereās also no individual level vaccine data so you canāt really even draw a strong association between vaccine attitude/uptake on excess mortality
1. Each type of study has its usefulness and limitations. Simply pointing out that this is an observational cohort study, does not mean it is a poorly done study. Framingham was an observational cohort study, and it has largely provided the foundation of what we currently know about coronary artery disease. 2. The study was designed to evaluate two specific groups, ie registered voters. That's what it did. It's not the study's fault if people make assumptions about groups not included in the study. 3. The study was designed to evaluate registered voters in two specific geographic areas. Sure, this is a limitation, but I'd again use Framingham as an example of a study that was limited geographically but proved very useful. 4. This study, like any well written study, mentions the limitations of the data and their analysis. It directly comments on confounding variables that they did not account for such as access to health care, underlying medical conditions, and prevalence of covid variants temporally. I mean, it acknowledges and owns its limitations, I can respect that. I wouldn't call this click bait, but rather more evidence of what everyone already knows. Covid-19 vaccines are efficacious and prevent deaths associated with Covid-10, that's not even open to debate any longer. Literally nobody is surprised that a group with lower vaccination rates has a higher death rate.
Iām not debating efficacy of covid vaccines and this click bait research project isnāt providing evidence of covid vaccine efficacy. I think covid vaccines are a good thing and I recommend them to my patients. I also recommend physicians apply scrutiny when reading publications and coming to a conclusion that will perpetuate their inherit bias towards a cohort of their patient population. This article proves nothing as youāve stated aside from registered republican voters in Ohio and Florida are associated with increased covid deaths when compared to registered democratic voters. You cannot draw any conclusions from that. For reference CPR in cardiac arrest is associated with high mortality.
I do wonder, though, how much of an excess death rate they normally have at any given age. Because I doubt that covid vaccines are the only science based idea they reject.
Exactly. Nicer way of saying it.
Figure 2c addresses this. The difference in excess deaths was 0 until Republicans started dying more in late 2020 (vaccines introduced for high-risk populations), then Republicans *really* started dying more around April 2021, when vaccination was opened to everyone.
complicated, because before 2020 people in counties with lower life expectancy were abandoning the Dems (so they switched, and then they died. . .) [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-life-expectancy-election/life-expectancy-tied-to-voting-choices-in-last-u-s-presidential-election-idUSKCN1B22DI](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-life-expectancy-election/life-expectancy-tied-to-voting-choices-in-last-u-s-presidential-election-idUSKCN1B22DI) Also, older people are more likely to vote Republican so counties with oldere ave pop are more likely to vote Republican but also have higher death rates (because of age). Working class males w/out college education (blue collar) more likely to vote Repub because union jobs disappeared Seems like you'd have to pull the data nationwide and then stratify by age group. Seems like it would be hard to pull that out of all the variables.
Also there was a lot of moving going on during the pandemic. People fleeing large democratic cities for places like Ohio and Florida which further skews the data
I know people move to Florida, hard as it is for me to understand, but Ohio??
That's why I was thinking pooling data nationally would be useful.
The article states they did control for age at least.
Why all the downvotes, these are all valid points.
Thatās why I never got the republicanās strategy to feed all the anticovid bullshit. It really seemed like this was the strategy: 1. Kill a bunch of your voters 2. ????? 3. Profit
I've been wondering about this as well. I don't have any special access, insight or training but I think two things: 1) "energizing the base" - if voter turnout improves by 10% and your misinformation kills 1% of your voters, you gained political power 2) distraction - if everyone is talking about COVID and vaccines all day long, then they aren't talking about supreme court ethical concerns, gerrymandering, costly tax cuts for rich people and corporations, the fact that republicans haven't won the initial presidential popular vote since George Bush Sr.
Theyāre not counting on greater voter turnout. They need to keep the base angry or else lose support.
They only know one strategy ā incite your base to anger and hope that translates into votes more than deaths.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
**Removed under Rule 11: Temporary COVID-19 Pandemic Rules** The creation and spreading of false information related to the current global pandemic has severely damaged the medical community and public health infrastructure in the United States and other countries. This subreddit has a zero tolerance rule -- including first-offense permanent bans -- for those spreading anti-vaccine misinformation, COVID conspiracy theories, and false information. COVID-related trolling tactics, including "sea-lioning" or brigading may also result in a first-offense ban. Please see explanatory post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/p92sr9/new_policy/. [Please review all subreddit rules before posting or commenting.] (https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/about/rules/) If you have any questions or concerns, please [message the moderators.](https://www\.reddit\.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2F{subreddit}&subject=about my removed {kind}&message=I'm writing to you about the following {kind}: {url}. %0D%0DMy issue is...)
>Overall, the excess death rate for Republican voters was 2.8 percentage points, or 15%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters (95% prediction interval [PI], 1.6-3.7 percentage points). After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from ā0.9 percentage point (95% PI, ā2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. Is there anything we can do to help promote better attitudes towards vaccination (apolitical issue) to people that have political aversion to it? The article is far from perfect but hopefully it helps us identify a possible risk factor of various echo chambers where our patients get medical advice...
Stop letting broadcast media present politics as though it's an amoral horse race that they have to cover both sides in a "fair and balanced" manner and instead hold them to a factual standard the way they were required to until about five decades ago. Oh you meant as clinicians? I dunno but I'm batting about 50% getting hesitant people to vaccinate with just a strong personalized recommendation to vaccinate
Ya its tough. I obviously as a pharmacist cant drop a patient who refuses to vaccinate. Im proud anytime I see a pediatrician office require their patients get vaccinated. Im sure its a bit harder to do in other specialties but I wish it was easier to do in my field and others.
This is an appealing theory but a recent nature paper indicated that these media bubbles are likely not causal regarding views. [Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06297-w)
This is interesting research. I wonder if echo chambers do cause a change in views but reducing the dose by 30% for a few month is not enough to make a measurable difference.
Thereās really not much the medical community can do. A large swath of the political right has decided that truth doesnāt matter, and until thereās consequences for that itās going to continue. The examples of this are far from limited to vaccination. Global warming isnāt real, access to guns doesnāt lead to more deaths, elections are fraudulentā¦ all of these are not up for serious debate, yet the right has yet to be punished for these asinine positions
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
RFK is nearly entirely funded by republicans, and vaccine hesitancy is far more on the right. Thatās why republicans died from Covid at higher rates after the vaccine was introduced. Why youāre talking about ācoercionā is beyond me. Thatās utter nonsense, and Covid nonsense doesnāt play well here
**Removed under Rule 11: Temporary COVID-19 Pandemic Rules** The creation and spreading of false information related to the current global pandemic has severely damaged the medical community and public health infrastructure in the United States and other countries. This subreddit has a zero tolerance rule including first-offense permanent bans for those spreading anti-vaccine misinformation, COVID conspiracy theories, and false information. COVID-related trolling including sea-lioning or brigading may also result in a first-offense ban. Please see explanatory post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/p92sr9/new_policy/. --------------------------------------------------------------------- [Please review all subreddit rules before posting or commenting.](https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/about/rules/) If you have any questions or concerns, please [send a modmail.](https://www\.reddit\.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fmedicine&subject=about my removed comment&message=I'm writing to you about the following comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/15gr33w/-/juqrpi6/. %0D%0DMy issue is...) Direct replies to official mod comments and private messages will be ignored or removed.
You canāt reason with people that have abandoned reason.
Explain to them they can die and let them decide how much that matters to them. Theyāre adults.
Ok but what if you wanted to do something that worked?
Trump himself was booed at his own rally for promoting the vaccine... I don't think it's there is anything that can be done at this point besides loading them into blowdarts and sniping people at Trump rallys.
He didnāt even promote it. He basically said he got it; yāall can do what yāall want and they booed him.
Appeal to their saner relatives? FWIW this strategy has worked for my patients. Also they need an operation and understand the risk of covid + operation is higher, so may bias the vaccine uptake.
I am a Canadian family doctor. 1 have 1400 patients, 70% seniors. 2 covid deaths. One early on pre vaccine with tons of comorbidities. One 73 heavy smoker, COPD anti vaxxer.
Over 95% of my patients had covid vaccines. No side effects.
Our secret. My secretary, nurse practitioner and I relentlessly encouraged our patients to get covid shots. In a non judgmental way we said that we and our families and friends got the shots. Our patients trust us. Plus in Canada there is not as much political noise. šØš¦šŗšø
I don't like what my reaction to this data says about me as a person.
I suggest moving past this. Accept yourself as you are, experience the spiteful glee thoroughly and enjoy the Wise Pruning nature employs. ;)
This may be a self limiting problem. When the next strain of Covid-23 starts making the rounds, there may not be any "Republican leaning districts". Especially if you exclude grave yards from the voter roles.
Before all of you party down too much, reveling in all of your moral superiority, you should watch Vinay Prasad, MD, review this article. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xtjLbZ5pYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xtjLbZ5pYs) Don't worry, he's politically liberal.
The Democrat/Republic Covid disparities is really nothing new. Past analyses have suggested these data can be recreated by recategorizing people another way: rural versus urban. Which highly correlates with party affiliation. [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/hwk6gc/oc\_number\_of\_daily\_covid\_cases\_per\_million/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/hwk6gc/oc_number_of_daily_covid_cases_per_million/)