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As David Leonhardt, writing for Friday’s New York Times points out, Omicron—whatever its severity ultimately turns out to be—is poised to disproportionately impact more Republican-leaning, vaccine- averse enclaves as it spreads throughout the country. And while he points out that leading conservative figures who have monetized and profited off the spread of disinformation about the pandemic, such as Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, or even Donald Trump could easily use their outsized megaphones to communicate this fact to the Republican base, he doesn’t see that as a likely prospect:
I don’t have any illusions about how likely this scenario is, but I do think that unvaccinated Americans — who are disproportionately Republican — are now in even more danger than a few weeks ago.
Leonhardt quotes Kossack Charles Gaba’s data—now familiar to most people who read this site—which indicates the stark disparity in vaccination rates between Trump-leaning counties and counties that voted largely for Joe Biden. As those of us familiar with Gaba’s efforts know, “This vaccination gap has created a huge gap in death rates, one that has grown sharply during the second half of the year.”
In hundreds of U.S. counties … most adults still have not received a Covid vaccine shot. “Just since this summer, 150,000 unvaccinated Americans have needlessly lost their lives despite the widespread availability of vaccines,” Dr. Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, said yesterday.
The reasons for this phenomenon have been explored over and over on this site. Leonhardt lists a few:
Vaccine skepticism stems in part from messages on social media and conservative outlets like Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group and talk radio. Pundits on these platforms often stop short of telling people not to get vaccinated, even as they send a general negative message about the shots.
They criticize vaccine mandates, sensationalize rare side effects and describe vaccination as a personal choice.
But even if omicron turns out to be, say, 30% less severe than the delta variant, because it is so contagious we are still almost certain to see a substantial spike in deaths; that’s just simple math at work. Leonhardt quotes Dr. Robert Wachter of the University of California, San Francisco:
Some basic arithmetic makes the point: Imagine that the risk of death is 30 percent lower from an Omicron case than a Delta case — but that Omicron leads to a tenfold increase in cases. This combination would lead to a substantial increase in deaths. “It’s bad number times a decent number, and you end up with a bad number,” Wachter said.
Having established that those most susceptible to the worst aspects and effects of omicron are first, the unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated, followed by those who have received both doses but no boosters, and assuming (as we must) that more Democrats than Republicans are now rushing out to get the booster shot, it’s not hard to predict the people who will be most severely impacted by omicron. The fact that 40% of Republican voters are out there without having received even one dose of these vaccines tells you all you need to know. And of those unvaccinated, very few are taking omicron seriously enough to even get vaccinated for the first dose.
What Leonhardt doesn’t mention—but seems rather obvious—is that if the omicron variant is spreading as fast as we know it is in Denmark, for example, where cases are doubling each day, then it’s already too late for the unvaccinated. Even if they run out and receive their first dose today, they won’t be eligible for another dose for three weeks thereafter. For boosters (under current guidelines), not until six months from their second dose. And even if these time frames are eventually truncated, we’re still looking at months before the currently unvaccinated could receive what is now characterized as adequate protection from omicron.
Along these lines, the old parable of the rice and the chessboard is instructive in showing how quickly something “doubling each day” can add up to an astronomical number within 30 days.
So by all evidence, omicron is coming very quickly. It’s coming this winter for everyone, to be sure, but (based on the early data) it’s mostly coming for those who never took the vaccines seriously in the first place; that is, those who never got vaccinated or did not do so until recently and therefore aren’t yet eligible for a booster shot. Those people are (disproportionately) Republicans. They’re not going to social distance, they’re certainly not going to start wearing masks. And thanks to their disinformation industry, social media, and those conservative politicians and media personalities who have sown doubt about the vaccines from the very start, it’s simply too late for most of them to do anything about it.
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