Analysis: After vaccines became available, a partisan gap in U.S. deaths emerged--Republicans died at higher rate--study

We know that many of those who died of the virus last year were unvaccinated. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that about 234,000 deaths from June 2021 through March 2022 could have been prevented had the decedents been vaccinated against the virus. That protection, too, held into the omicron era.

We also know that Republicans were less likely to get vaccinated than Democrats. Republican officials often downplayed the utility of vaccination, responding to framing of the shots as an unnecessary intrusion from the government. Trump-voting counties were also more likely to seek alternative treatments for covid, such as the drug ivermectin — treatments that were shown repeatedly not to be effective.

All of this, though, was correlation. We couldn’t say that more Republicans were dying, specifically, so the link to partisanship was indirect, however clearly rational an assumption it might have been.

Last month, though, the National Bureau of Economic Research published an important study from researchers affiliated with Yale University. They took 577,659 death records from Ohio and Florida between January 2018 and December 2021 and matched the decedents to a 2017 voter file. In other words, they were able to identify the partisanship not only of the places those people lived but of the people themselves.

What they found is that the rate of excess death — that is, deaths above the expected toll relative to the pre-pandemic baseline — was higher for Republicans, particularly after vaccines were rolled out.

“Registered Republicans in Florida and Ohio had higher excess death rates than registered Democrats, driven by a large mortality gap in the period after all adults were eligible for vaccines,” the researchers write. “These results adjust for county-by-age differences in excess deaths during the pandemic, suggesting that there were within-age-by-county differences in excess death associated with political party affiliation.”

You can see that on charts included in the report. Democrats and Republicans in Ohio and Florida died at higher rates than would have been expected based on 2018 patterns. But Republicans were much more likely to do so, particularly after the second dark, vertical line on the graph — the point at which all adults became eligible for vaccines.