Another COVID milestone

This is so wrong. In order to score political points, Republicans have been willing to cast public health interventions against the pandemic -- shutdowns, masks, vaccines -- as partisan hoaxes. And the result has been literally deadly to their own voters. 

Philip Bump tells the story with a series of charts:

Thanks in part to President Donald Trump having argued that the virus posed little risk and was soon going to vanish from the United States, Republicans began to express far less concern about being infected. They reported being less likely to take preventive measures against contracting the disease, such as wearing a mask. And, over time, Republican parts of the country began seeing higher rates of mortality than places that voted for Joe Biden in November 2020.

And, inextricably, White Americans — a demographic the vast majority of Republicans are part of — began consistently dying at higher rates than non-Whites.

Black citizens were slow to get on the vaccine bandwagon for all the usually cited reasons, from distrust of the medical authorities to poverty. But Republican sabotage has achieved an improbable result:

While the rate of covid-19 deaths among Black Americans was higher than that for Whites in each of the first 15 months of the pandemic, White Americans started seeing higher rates last September — when the delta variant was hammering red states and as the vaccination divide was really starting to be felt.

It’s likely that this month White Americans will have seen a higher per capita death rate than Black Americans for the first time during the pandemic. That change is clearly attributable in large part to attitudes about masking and vaccination, and those attitudes are attributable to partisanship.

It's downright unAmerican to see racist White politicians set their White followers up to suffer more than Black people. But the current set of GOPer pols have managed it -- and they are killing their dupes.