The WSJ hands DeSantis the issue
You’re not going to believe this one. But I’ll bet they run with it:
March, 29, 2020, is a day that should live in infamy. The national mitigation plan against Covid-19, “15 days to stop the spread,” was about to expire. In the Rose Garden, President Trump declared that lockdowns would continue for another 30 days. I tweeted: “President Trump just lost the election.”
When Mr. Trump announced his 2024 campaign Tuesday, he didn’t apologize for the lockdowns or even mention them. I supported him in 2016, and during his tenure he did much to dredge the political swamps, but his decision to approve and extend drastic Covid interventions should disqualify him for a second term.
The White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Vice President Mike Pence, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, put the Constitution into an induced coma. Mr. Trump’s decision to adopt Chinese Communist Party tactics and close down the country gave license to states to amplify and extend these terrible policies, to governors to wield unprecedented executive powers, and to school districts to shut students out for months or even years.
Mr. Trump did very little to constrain this overreach. His dramatic Covid order shut down your business, barred your kids from school, denied you access to your church, your gym and your coffee shop. It suppressed screenings and treatments for cancer and other illnesses and kept people from visiting loved ones in the hospital or attending their funerals.
Studies appear weekly confirming what almost everyone now acknowledges—the lockdowns were futile as well as onerous. One set of researchers wrote: “Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic.”
Mr. Trump paid lip service to the need to reopen the country but never rallied lawmakers or other officials to do anything about it. It was left to governors like Brian Kemp of Georgia and Ron DeSantis of Florida to do that on their own.
Mr. DeSantis signed legislation that put specific triggers in place to prevent county health directors from declaring an emergency with unending powers. He implemented a patient’s bill of rights. He has continued to lead the battle against Dr. Fauci and his unending fear tactics. Little wonder the governor was resoundingly re-elected last week while Mr. Trump’s favored candidates went down in swing states across the country.
Covid-19 weakened America’s political immune system, leaving the country vulnerable to confusion, panic, unease and cowardice. Mr. Trump had been elected to combat this kind of insanity. He failed when it mattered most and doesn’t deserve another term.
DeSantis also hired a vaccine denying, Ivermectin pushing surgeon general and they’ve been telling people not to bother getting vaccinated.
Guess what?
The question of whether and how much party affiliation affects COVID-19 outcomes has been widely debated among public health scholars and isn’t easy to answer. Some research has found that the death toll from COVID-19 has been higher in red counties than blue ones, but analyzing data at the county level makes it hard to be sure that party alone explains the differences. It’s theoretically possible that other factors about those counties, such as weather or average household size or availability of health care, could be more significant contributors to the death rate than how they voted.Looking for more insights?Sign up to get our top stories by email.Email
Goldsmith-Pinkham and his co-authors decided to take a different approach that would avoid these pitfalls. They gathered nearly 600,000 Ohio and Florida death records from 2018 to 2021 and matched those records to voter registration data from 2017. This allowed them to determine the party affiliation of each person who died.
Then, they used data from 2019 as a benchmark to determine expected death rates based on age, time of year, location, and party affiliation. In other words, they calculated how many Republicans and Democrats in a given age bracket and a given county would normally die in a given season. Anything above or below that 2019 “normal” was considered an “excess death.”
The excess death framework had two important strengths: It allowed the researchers to study the effects of political party at an individual rather than geographic level, and it provided a built-in means of accounting for differences of age and location.
When the researchers looked at excess deaths before and after the pandemic, the results were sobering. Tragically, but not surprisingly, both Republicans and Democrats experienced a sudden uptick in mortality in during the first year of the pandemic. While excess death rates were slightly higher among Republicans than Democrats, “both are dying at really high rates over this period,” Goldsmith-Pinkham says.
The fates of Republicans and Democrats began to diverge markedly after the introduction of vaccines in April of 2021. Between March 2020 and March 2021, excess death rates for Republicans were 1.6 percentage points higher than for Democrats. After April 2021, the gap widened to 10.6 percentage points.
They killed people. The right’s hostility to masks and vaccine mandates and other mitigations killed thousands and thousands of people. And they are going to run on that as a selling point against Donald Trump.
Think about that. It’s just stunning.