We’re entering the third year of the pandemic
and in the US the loss of life, month by month,
for two years, looks like this. Altogether more than 900,000 people have died. But there really are two pandemics here. Because starting in the spring of 2021 the distribution of the vaccines dramatically
changed the nature of the pandemic. If we look closer at the delta wave
and the beginning of omicron we see the deaths of unvaccinated people were
much higher than vaccinated people. This data comes from a subset of US states
and cities that provide immunization data. While the delta wave did kill
some vaccinated people the risk was 15 times higher
if you were unvaccinated. Philly Baird was one of those
unvaccinated people. And he started going live on his
Facebook page from the hospital. "I love you guys." "I’m able to talk today." "Today’s been a great day." In one of the videos he recommends to his
friends and family that they get the vaccine. Do you think that was a
hard thing for him to say? Yes, because that’s not what he had been
communicating, you know, prior to that. But I think that he would want me to communicate
what I know he wanted and that is for you to look at his situation and realize that you could possibly get you could get severe the Covid like he did
and be fighting for your life. And then have a lot of regrets that you didn’t
have the vaccine at that time. "You know I was one of those
that sat there and kinda was more on the political side with
Covid and all." "We gotta put all that aside." Now when it comes to the political breakdown
on vaccinations, there are two things to know. One is that a majority of Republicans are
vaccinated with at least 1 dose according to the most recent survey
from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The 2nd thing to know is that most
unvaccinated Americans are Republican. So the question is: how does that affect the
balance of lives lost? Well, we can plot the states directly by their
2020 election results with the red states on the right and the blue
states on the left. And we can look at their death rates since
April 2021. And it's pretty striking. The Republican states were suffering
much bigger losses. And I want to stress that this relationship
wasn’t there before the vaccines. This is the same chart, but it shows death
rates before April 2021. And they’re much more spread out, with Covid
hitting blue states as hard as red ones. So what I want to understand is the series
of events that took us from this... to this. "The Democrats are in a full-court freak out
over coronavirus after Ted cruz self-isolated
after coming into contact..." Phil Valentine was my younger brother. A very accomplished radio entertainment personality. "New York Times even called it the Trump virus." "Can you imagine if the Ebola virus had been
called the Obama virus?" He was on air in July and you can hear him
kind of talking through the symptoms. "This is my Covid saga." "And yesterday was probably my worst day and
just the shaking and the chills..." Really processing things on air. "And as I’ve told you, I’m not judging
anybody either way." "If you want to get the vaccine,
it’s a personal health decision." "I made the decision that I probably wouldn’t
die from it." "Phil would like his listeners to know that
he regrets not being more vehemently pro-vaccine." "He is in the hospital in the critical-care
unit..." He said, you know, I got it wrong. And then it went from bad to worse. We know how it all ended. "We’re all very sad right now at the passing
of a friend and a colleague." "And our thoughts and prayers go out to Susan
and the boys at their tremendous loss." Had he been opposed to other types of vaccines
in the past? Were his or his kids vaccinated
with the school vaccines? He wasn't against anything else? No. It’s not obvious that Republicans would
be more vaccine hesitant. Similar percentages of Democrats and Republicans said they get the flu shot “every year”
according to a May 2020 poll. And in 2019, the Pew Research Center
found that nearly identical shares of
Republicans and Democrats said that the benefits of the vaccinating
kids for measles, mumps, and rubella outweigh the risks. Republicans were slightly less likely to say
they should be required but it’s nothing like the
30 point gap that we see in Covid vaccination rates today. One way to understand that gap is to consider
the vastly different information environments that Republicans and Democrats live in. This is a list of news sources trusted by
at least 40% of Democrats according to a 2019 survey by Pew. "... health officials warn..."
"... the highest daily rate..." "... the Covid variant was first reported..." "... the latest data from the centers..." And here’s a list of news sources trusted
by at least 40% of Republicans. What this means is that American conservatives
are quite exposed to the editorial choices of a single network. And on vaccine coverage, that network's choices
have been confusing. "It’s a great vaccine. It’s a safe vaccine." "It is something that can keep you out of
the hospital." "How many people have been killed or injured
by the Covid vaccines? Does anyone know the answer?" "If your doctor says you’re ok for it,
get it. It will save your life." "I got my second dose. I got a horrific pain in my right eye." "The vaccine is still working. It’s still protecting you and those around
you." "Why should you penalize people for not taking
a vaccine which doesn’t work?" "The mRNA covid vaccines need to be withdrawn
from the market now. No one should get them. No one should get boosted. No one should get double boosted." If we compare the information sources of those
who said they’d definitely get vaccinated with the information sources of those who
said they would definitely not get vaccinated we see that the vaccine-resisters were less
likely to consume most news sources except for two: Fox News and social media. For 18 hours, I laid in bed
dealing with my mortality and not knowing which way
that was going to go. And I'm laying in bed going, this is my fault. I should have been listening to doctors and
nurses and medical professionals instead of my political algorithms. And so is it mostly Facebook where you were
getting sort of these messages? Yes. I saw some of Fox News reports online. But, 90 - 95 percent of what I got was through my
algorithms and friends on Facebook. And I can tell you when I started
telling people, you need to consider this vaccine and
you need to stop politicizing this. I lost a lot of friends, and the more hardcore
you were... I had some really ugly things said to me. And I had to start blocking people that I've
been friends with for years. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that 64%
of unvaccinated people believed at least 4 pieces of Covid-19 misinformation,
of the 8 that they tested. And they found that among those who trusted
conservative news outlets belief in misinformation was more common than
among those who trusted other sources. But we have to remember that this is a correlation. We don’t know if anti-vax content
on TV and Facebook caused people to turn against the vaccine or if it was simply pandering to people who
had already made up their mind. It was probably both. See, one thing I didn’t mention
about this chart is that this data is actually
from January 2021. So most of the anti-vaccine content on these
platforms hadn’t been published. So I went back and searched for
the earliest polling I could find. This is from May of 2020 and it asked people if they would get
a hypothetical coronavirus vaccine. 40 percent of Republicans said
“definitely not or probably not.” And that’s pretty much where Republicans
are at today, 20 months later. So what explains why a big chunk of Republican
voters had already turned against the vaccine six months before the presidential election and nearly a year before the vaccines
were even available? I think the answer is somewhere in here. Of the 8 false claims polled by the Kaiser
Family Foundation the one most widely believed wasn’t about
the vaccines at all. And so of the different pieces of misinformation
we tested, the most commonly believed overall and particularly by Republicans was this idea that the government was inflating
the number of deaths due to Covid-19. "Top US health officials are rejecting President
Trump’s suggestion that the US coronavirus case and death totals are 'fake news'." "He said a couple of hours ago the number
of cases and deaths of the China virus..." "... are quote 'far exaggerated'." That claim was based on a misunderstanding
of how death certificates work but it was extremely potent. If you’ve been told not to trust the death
count, how do you assess your own risk? And why would you take action to protect yourself
and your family? If we compare unvaccinated republicans with
their vaccinated counterparts the biggest difference between them isn’t
that the unvaccinated ones are younger or more conservative or more rural although they are it’s the pervasiveness of the belief that seriousness of the coronavirus
is generally exaggerated. And that idea that the pandemic has been made
into a bigger deal than it really is has been an overarching belief for a majority
of Republicans. Even as Covid became one of the leading causes
of death in the US even as the virus shifted
from cities to rural America. And that takes us back to the very first weeks
of the pandemic. When the virus found a United States under
an exceptionally polarizing president and at the start of an election year. "We have it under control.
It’s going to be just fine." "Joe Biden calling him the worst possible
person to lead our country through virus." "Well we pretty much shut it down
coming in from China." "President Trump has no plan, no urgency,
no understanding of the facts." "If the coronavirus ends up having a real
impact on the economy it could tip the election to the—" "Democrats and their media cronies have decided
to weaponize fear to improve their chances against Trump in
November." In the early stages of the pandemic, you got
this very large polarization around things like lockdowns, mask wearing, and the severity
of the pandemic itself. Just how seriously to take this. "Trump supported anti-lockdown protests..." "Liberate Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia." "...states led be Democratic governors." "President Trump without a mask..." "Defiance in the face of adversity..." "Joe Biden wearing one." "...an image of trepidation, even fear." "Making for a splitscreen campaign moment." And it seems that rank and file Republicans,
largely on their own, figured out that if you don’t take the pandemic seriously,
why would you get vaccinated? You know the people telling you to do it,
they’re not trustworthy. And so, you know, flash forward to spring
of 2021 and you get this weird paradox where most Republican politicians are vaccinated but they're saying stuff at the same time
to cater to to anti-vaccine sentiment in their base and now there's real political downside to
promoting vaccination for a lot of these folks. "...your freedoms, I do. You have to do what you have to do." "But! I recommend take the vaccines." "I did it. It's good." "Take the vaccines." "But you got — no that's okay, that's alright." "You've got your freedoms..." Let me tell you how I make sense
of what happened to your brother and I want to get your reaction. I see Phil looking at the data concluding that his risk of dying
from Covid was low. But I think his brain was sort of pushed in
the direction of that conclusion by signals that were sent really early on in the pandemic
by Trump and Fox and others that Republicans kind of think this coronavirus
is overblown. The polarization starts there. Then by the time the vaccines come out Phil's not getting clear, consistent signals
from the people that he trusts that it's time to update his risk calculation
and go ahead and get that vaccine. And then he gets hit by the beginning
of the delta wave. Does that seem accurate to you? That's on the right track, I think that that... The calculus changed when the delta variant
presented itself because it attacked a much younger segment of the population. Then all of a sudden, politics starts
to enter into the thing. We already we've just come off of being lied
to for three years straight that Trump was a Russian agent,
a traitor to the country. So I think that that was that people looked
askance at that whole messaging system. The underlying problem is that there are two
diametrically opposed views of what America should be like in this world and one is held by one side and
one is held by the other so you decide which one
you’re going to be on. You get into this situation where elite politicians
in the respective parties feel like they have to polarize on the issue because their base expects them to disagree
with the other party. It would have helped a great deal of the elites
of the political leaders of our country had coordinated across party lines and laid out a unified message at the beginning I definitely think we could have largely mitigated
the polarized responses that we saw in the mass public. What do you hope for, what do you fear,
when it comes to polarization around public health issues? One of the things I really worry about
going forward is what we’d like is reduced polarization around
Covid vaccination especially as we move into a possible regular
regime of boosting going forward. But what I think might be more likely if we
aren't really, really effective and proactive on reducing that polarization is that polarization around Covid vaccination
persists and spreads to other vaccines like measles, mumps, rubella. And sure enough, researchers at UC San Diego
tracked vaccine attitudes from March to August 2021 and they found that not only were the Republicans
in their study more likely to turn against the Covid vaccine as the year went on they also ended up with declining attitudes
about vaccines in general and lower intentions to get
the flu shot next year. Which means the health consequences of pandemic
polarization could extend well beyond Covid-19.
Pro tip on how to have a better chance of getting "Meta/Other" posts approved: use the article or video headline as your post title. Thanks, OP!
Mods remove most of the news articles and videos that are submitted because we want to focus on nominations and awards. There's still no guarantee that an article with a proper post title will be approved. There are just too many low-effort "articles" out there, and we want quality!
Sundays have relaxed posting criteria, too.
The right created this antivaxx monster and have now found that they cannot control it. When trump said Covid was nothing to worry about, all the Cult45 followers latched onto that. After finding out that it was much more serious than trump first let on, him knowing this from the beginning, it was too late. His Cult45 minions were already too invested in the "It's only the flu" narritave to change course.
She touches on the crux of the entire problem when she's talking to Phil Valentine's brother and says something to the effect of him failing to recognize when it was time to update his risk assessment.
Conservative people will always struggle with recognizing when it is "time to update their assessments" because the very idea is antithetical to their entire worldview. Clinging to outdated assessments is kinda their schtick.
If that guy was ever awarded I move that his HCA be revoked. What he did in those videos took a tremendous amount of humility, vulnerability, and bravery. He stared his community in the face while he was dying and told them to learn from his mistake.
Not to over-praise this guy, but I think maybe HCA could use another award that rewards the humbled repentant.
E: I'm talkin about the dude in the hospital, NOT Phil Valentine. Fuck that guy.
Very well done. The fact that the right doesn’t trust left leaning or neutral media is alarming. Echo chamber of slanted information. Like watching state TV. Brainwashed sheep. The very thing they are fearful of.
Fucking lol, social media and Fox News are literally killing conservatives
It seems that it’s not so much that they turned against the vaccine as it that Liberals turned towards it, and since Conservatism only exists as a reactive opposition to Liberalism, anything Liberals like is “bad” and anything they hate must be “good”.
This is good. Thanks for sharing.
Excellent video. Lots of data-based insights. Thank you.
(And Phil Valentine’s brother was still wrong about Trump and reasons to distrust mainstream media: Trump obviously WAS a sort of Russian agent.)