The facts are in: being Republican, white, and Southern is hazardous to your health
"They're ruining our country, these vaccine Nazis," Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene told – who else? – Steve Bannon on his “War Room” podcast today. When Bannon asked her if vaccine mandates show “the fascism of the elites,” Greene agreed with him: "They are the fascists. They have called us fascists and have called us Nazis for like five years now, and I'm fed up with it, because that's exactly who they are," Greene said. "They are the Nazis!"
This when New York City just announced that only 34 police officers were put on paid leave yesterday for not getting their first COVID vaccine shot by the Monday vaccine mandate deadline. (The city is working its way through a long list of officers who have applied for religious exemptions, most of which will probably not be granted, according to an NYPD source quoted by the New York Post.)
Despite Ms. Greene, vaccine mandates are saving lives. NBC News reported today that New York State had the steepest decline in deaths from COVID in the nation, when the statistics for early deaths from the disease are compared to the most recent numbers. New York had rate of 153.5 deaths per hundred thousand in the early days of the pandemic. The state’s death rate today is 10.7 deaths per hundred thousand. Florida, on the other hand, had a death rate of 10.4 per hundred thousand at the onset of the pandemic; today the Florida death rate is 83.9 per hundred thousand, the highest in the nation.
In New York, 71 percent of adults have had at least one dose of COVID vaccine. Florida’s vaccine rate for adults is almost exactly the same at 69 percent. But New York City and other municipalities in the state have instituted vaccine and mask mandates for indoor dining, and many New York businesses have issued similar mandates. In Florida it’s the opposite. Governor Ron DeSantis has banned mask and vaccine mandates in the state, including for school children eligible for the vaccine. The death rates for the two states prove what works and what doesn’t.
Today, NBC News reported that rates for COVID cases and deaths have risen steeply in rural Southern states while declining by similar amounts in the densely populated states in the Northeast and West. “Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and West Virginia were among the states that experienced the biggest spikes in Covid death rates during the most recent wave,” NBC reported.
The other thing that has changed is who is dying from the disease. In the early months of the pandemic, it was primarily the elderly, with 83 percent of deaths among those 75 and older. Today, it is people in middle age who are dying in the largest numbers, especially those 55 to 74 years old. Deaths among those 33 to 54 are also up sharply.
Racial disparities have flipped as well. COVID deaths among Black people have declined 10 percent, while deaths of white people are up 16 percent. In fact, as NBC News reported, those who are dying at the highest rate today are “younger, Southern, rural and white,” while in the early days of the pandemic it was the other way around.
“Unvaccinated individuals represented the overwhelming majority in the most recent deaths,” NBC reported. Dr. James Conway, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told NBC News that “this has become a disease of the unimmunized.”
More than 730,000 people have died from COVID in the U.S., and experts are forecasting that 50,000 more could die by the end of the year, even though the surge in cases due to the Delta variant has begun to subside nearly everywhere.
We have suspected this for a long time, and now the facts are out: The worst COVID rates of infections, hospitalizations and deaths are in Republican controlled states in the South and Midwest. If you are white and you voted Republican in the last election, you are far more likely to contract the virus and die from it than if you are Black and voted Democratic.
And yet the politicization of COVID continues apace. Marjorie Taylor Greene told Steve Bannon today, “I'm not getting the vaccine because I'm an American. I can choose what I want to do with my body.” Not for long. Soon we may find ourselves in a new political reality, one where women in conservative Republican states will be prevented from choosing to have an abortion even if they have been raped, but free to “choose” to die from COVID and spread the disease to others by not vaccinating themselves or wearing masks.
When non-existent fantasies like “stolen” elections and “critical race theory” are bigger issues than protecting our fellow citizens from a disease that is almost entirely preventable, we’re in big trouble. What we face is a creeping fascism of ignorance, inequality, and despair, and we fail to confront it at our peril.
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It is mass madness. I re-watched "Network" for the umpteenth time. It captures the feel of collective inanity. Before this there was Rev. Jimmy Jones, the kool-aide charismatic. There must be a kind of switch in the human brain that malignant narcissists instinctively know how to throw and trigger mass madness. Now with media access to millions, these guys are really on a roll. No more riding from town to town on horseback and preaching in tents.
Much of the south lives with bitter memories and a feeling of desperation. Especially rural whites who cling to Confederate Lost Cause mythology. You can't reason with such dense thinking. Congresswoman Green is just another Grifter stroking the country folk for money. Steve Bannon is a predator and oblivious to the pain he brings into peoples lives.