New York Times Pinpoints Why Covid is Killing More People in Red America than Blue America: It’s the Vaccines

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

Throughout the pandemic, many observers and pundits argued that due to demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioral differences a gap would emerge between Covid-19 death rates in red and blue states — a prediction which bore false, until now, argues David Leonhardt of the New York Times. 

Leonhardt explains the new trend, “October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in heavily Trump counties and heavily Biden counties widened.” 

The comparison of Covid-19 statistics between states and cities, especially red and blue states (like Florida and California for example), figures prominently in media coverage of the pandemic in the U.S. as commentators look for evidence of success and failure in different leaders and policy approaches.

Leonhardt notes that many believed early in the pandemic that red America would outpace blue America in terms of Covid-19 deaths due to factors like “lower income, older, [and] more mask resistance” among the population. 

But, Leonhardt reminds us that blue America too had its risk factors for Covid-19 that “largely offset each other in 2020 — or maybe they didn’t matter as much as some people assumed,” including, “more busy international airports and more Americans who suffer the health consequences of racial discrimination.”

“Either way, the per capita death toll in blue America and red America was similar by the final weeks of 2020,” he continues. “Then the vaccines arrived.”

Leonhardt concludes that “partisan attitudes” toward getting the Covid-19 vaccines account for the emerging gap, which is now at its widest point and appears to only be growing.

The vaccines proved so powerful, and the partisan attitudes toward them so different, that a gap in Covid’s death toll quickly emerged.

It has grown over the course of this year and is now at its widest point. pic.twitter.com/pyWKHl4Ann

— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) November 8, 2021

He dismisses attempts on the right to attribute the gap to other factors like “weather or age” in red states, noting that if that were the case the gap would have emerged much earlier. Instead, he argues the fact that polls show “almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults” is why this new gap exists.