Hacker News

Summary:

538 guy posts that red states have worse mortality from covid than blue states because of lower vaccine uptake, having previously tested the claim for confounding factors.

MUH FREEDUM medic claims that he should have controlled for age because red states are older on average. 538 guy points out that that's barely true and that in the oldest four states, the red/blue mortality split is stark. He then shows his working for controlling for age and shows that the correlation is almost exactly as strong.

It turns out that, in a statistical fact that should surprise no one at all who isn't a conspiracy theorist, higher vaccination rates against covid are the biggest determiner for covid survival rates, and in a statistical fact that should surprise no one at all who kept up with the news, the republican party, and Donald Rump himself managed to persuade their gullible followers that covid was some sort of scam and the vaccine was dangerous.

My reaction was to wonder why the republicans would mislead their voters to their deaths in such numbers, but then I remembered that the republican party doesn't give a shit about its voters, it just wants to mislead them into voting republican. If it gave a shit about its voters it would have very different policies.