Why would they do that?
People have pooh-poohed my comments about the Republicans killing off their own voters, but they actually did:
Despite the availability of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines, so many people died in the second year of the pandemic in the U.S. that the nation’s life expectancy dropped for a second year in a row last year, according to a new analysis.
The analysis of provisional government statistics found U.S. life expectancy fell by just under a half a year in 2021, adding to a dramatic plummet in life expectancy that occurred in 2020. Public health experts had hoped the vaccines would prevent another drop the following year.
“The finding that instead we had a horrible loss of life in 2021 that actually drove the life expectancy even lower than it was in 2020 is very disturbing,” says Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of population health and health equity at Virginia Commonwealth University, who help conduct the analysis. “It speaks to an extensive loss of life during 2021.”
Many of the deaths occurred in people in the prime of their lives, Woolf says, and drove the overall U.S. life expectancy to fall to 76.6 years — the lowest in at least 25 years.
“Shame on the U.S.,” says Noreen Goldman, a demographer at Princeton University who wasn’t involved in the research. “It just continues to boggle my mind how poorly we’ve come through this pandemic. And I find that disgraceful.”
The 2021 drop came after U.S life expectancy plummeted in 2020, tumbling by almost two years — the biggest one-year fall in U.S. life expectancy since at least World War II.
“The motivation for this study was to determine whether the horrible drop in life expectancy that we documented in 2020 resolved or rebounded in 2021 or whether there was a continued decline. Unfortunately, we did not find good news,” Woolf told NPR in an interview.
Surprisingly, while the 2020 drop in life expectancy hit Blacks and Hispanics hardest, that wasn’t the case in 2021, the analysis found. Life expectancy among Hispanics didn’t significantly change between 2020 and 2021, and life expectancy of Blacks actually inched up slightly — by a little less than half a year.
In contrast, the life expectancy of whites fell by about a third of a year, mostly among white men.
“So what this tells us is that this continued decline in life expectancy that we see in the second year has been carried mainly by deaths in the white population,” Woolf says.
It’s unclear why this happened, but Woolf and others think it may be due in part to whites being more likely to live in states with fewer restrictions, so they let down their guard more, while often refusing to get vaccinated.
“The deaths that occurred in 2021 were a product not only of a lack of vaccination, which was a huge factor, but also being in places that didn’t observe policies like masking and social distancing that prevented transmission of the virus,” Woolf says.
Because of the huge loss of life among Blacks and Hispanic in 2020, their life expectancy went down more than whites over the last two years. But the reason whites continued to die in larger numbers in 2021 can be attributed to the fact that unlike Blacks and Hispanics they refused to get vaccinated. And we know why, don’t we?
I don’t know if it will make any difference in the GOP vote next fall but you have to wonder. In a close race every vote is important. And the people they led to their deaths are their hard-core older, white, male voters. Ooops.