The Continued Politicization of Covid

From the beginning of COVID two years ago, health authorities and the media have been preaching “follow the science,” but what they don’t say is that it’s not medical science that they are following but instead political science.

How else does one explain sudden new rules and recommendations, contradicting past “settled science,” regarding everything from natural immunity and off label therapeutics to the futility of masks and social distancing. It seems that overnight the science changed with this viral pandemic due to an upcoming election and the convenient distraction of Russian-Ukrainian war.

Does anyone doubt that COVID would have played out far differently in 2020 if it had been President Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders running for reelection rather than Donald Trump? The Pew Research Center analyzed the COVID timeline regarding voting patterns, confirming the continued political lens which is being applied to COVID.

From Pew’s recent article,

In the spring of 2020, the areas recording the greatest numbers of deaths were much more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. But by the third wave of the pandemic, which began in fall 2020, the pattern had reversed: Counties that voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden were suffering substantially more deaths from the coronavirus pandemic than those that voted for Biden over Trump. This reversal is likely a result of several factors including differences in mitigation efforts and vaccine uptake, demographic differences, and other differences that are correlated with partisanship at the county level.

So it’s political. Those ignorant and stubborn Republicans who wouldn’t take the vaccine or wear masks are the sole cause of this discrepancy. No other explanation is possible, just as pickup driving Texans are the main reason the climate is changing, independent of solar activity and a host of other far more influential factors.

Yet in the same article, Pew debunks their political argument:

In many cases, the characteristics of communities that were associated with higher death rates at the beginning of the pandemic are now associated with lower death rates (and vice versa). Early in the pandemic, urban areas were disproportionately impacted. During the first wave, the coronavirus death rate in the 10% of the country that lives in the most densely populated counties was more than nine times that of the death rate among the 10% of the population living in the least densely populated counties. In each subsequent wave, however, the nation’s least dense counties have registered higher death rates than the most densely populated places.

No kidding. Viruses spread from person to person, so it makes sense that densely populated inner cities suffered far more and earlier than rural areas. And those densely populated areas tend to vote Democrat. This is association, not causation. Ladies who play bingo tend to be older and have blue hair. Is that due to them playing bingo? Or just an association?

Once the virus spreads through the inner cities, most residents have been exposed and infected, conferring natural immunity, protecting them from subsequent waves and strains of the virus. If anything, these first waves affected the lower socioeconomic classes, the essential workers who kept hospitals and grocery stores open while the latte-sipping Zoom class hustled out of town to rural America where they could maintain their incomes and lifestyles far from what at the time were inner city death zones.

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