R&I NV — Photo credit ELIJAH NOUVELAGE / GETTY IMAGES
By Kaleigh Rogers
Filed under Say What?
Who said what …
A few weeks ago, Breitbart News — the right-wing, hyperpartisan news site formerly run by Steve Bannon — published a truly galaxy brain column. Editor-at-large John Nolte argued that Democrats have been promoting the COVID-19 vaccine not to save lives but instead to trick Republican voters into not getting the jab. Nolte’s theory concluded that this, in turn, would lead to unvaccinated Republicans getting sick and dying from COVID-19, ultimately helping Democrats electorally.
Nolte claimed that liberals, in a sinister application of reverse psychology, knew that aggressively pushing the vaccine would lead those on the right to resist, putting them at greater risk for severe infection or death. “In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?” Nolte wrote. He then said that the real way to stick it to liberals would be to embrace the “Trump Vaccine” for the life-saving modern miracle that it is.
Sometimes flawed logic can still lead you to the correct conclusion.
Why some white evangelicals are rethinking their politics | FiveThirtyEight
Some background …
Nolte’s take has emerged from the toxic politicization of the pandemic in the U.S. Since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout began in the U.S, there has been a partisan gap in vaccination rates. When comparing the rate of fully vaccinated people living in counties that voted for Trump in 2020 with those in counties that voted for Biden, blue counties had a higher vaccination rate by 12.9 percentage points, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Similarly, a Morning Consult poll has shown that Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say they are unsure of whether they will get the vaccine. Republicans are also more likely to say they do not plan on getting vaccinated, according to that same poll. And it’s true that more right-leaning areas of the country are seeing more deaths from COVID-19, too: a recent New York Times analysis showed states with some of the highest 2020 vote share for Trump also have the highest death rates.
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