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The politicization of everything

Is there nowhere free from politics anywhere in these Ununited States anymore?

Scientists once tried to at least make an effort to avoid the societal cesspool of politicization, even if they sometimes failed, but the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic seems to have changed everything.

First, there was the flurry of  “studies” concluding red states were hit harder than blue states by the potentially deadly virus because their residents didn’t mask up enough or weren’t quick enough to get vaccinated or, in some cases, opposed vaccination.

The studies, of course, ignored all the confounders that determined who got the sickest during the pandemic – things like co-morbidities, obesity, general fitness and the age structure of a state’s population.

These were huge factors given that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has reported that nearly 95 percent of those who died with or of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, had at least one other cause for their demised listed on their death certificate and “on average, there were four additional conditions or causes per death.”

Then, too, there was the matter of age. There the CDC recorded that 93 percent of those whose death involved Covid-19 were 50 or older and more than 75 percent were 65 or older. 

Lastly there was the little matter of social economic status (SES). The CDC didn’t track how deaths differed between the rich and the poor, but scientists in some other countries did.

And what they found, as reported in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, was “that the risk of infection and death from COVID-19 was disproportionately higher for people with a disadvantaged socioeconomic status,” or as the researchers who looked specifically at the data for South Africa recorded, “vulnerability to COVID-19 was more concentrated among the poor.”

Some of the red states in the U.S., particularly those in the South, flagged as victims of their politics have significant proportions of their populations living in poverty. According to the U.S. Census, Mississippi, Louisiana and West Virginia, in that order, are the three states with the greatest percentage of residents in poverty. 

Mississippi and West Virginia are also ranked third and fourth for per capita Covid-19 deaths since the pandemic began, according to the data-tracking website Statista. Oklahoma, the seventh poorest state in the nation, is number two in deaths. New Mexico, the fourth poorest state in the nation, is number five. Arizona, which leads the list of Covid-19 deaths per capita, is the outlier; it is only the 20th poorest state in the nation.

The states of New Hampshire and Utah have the lowest poverty rates in the nation, according to U.S. News and World Report. And Statistisa reports Utah, a very red state, has the third lowest Covid-19 death rate since the pandemic began. Only Hawaii and Vermont, a blue state with a Republican governor, fared better.

New Hampshire was ninth lowest in per capita Covid-19 deaths, two positions worse than Alaska, another red state.

Suffice it to say there was a lot more going on as to who died from Covid-19 at the height of the pandemic than the political color of the state in which they resided.

And now with the pandemic fading into the rearview mirror comes a study of differences in reporting “adverse events (AEs)” after being vaccinated which declares that “a 10 percent  increase in Republican voting was associated with increased odds of AE reports, severe AE reports, and the proportion of AEs reported as severe.”

Over-reported or under-reported?

This “study,” published on JAMA Network Open, a website administered by the Journal of the American Medical Association, goes on to say that “these results suggest that either the perception of vaccine AEs or the motivation to report them was associated with political inclination.”

This is certainly possible.

Someone expecting to face an adverse event from an injection is inherently more likely to observe such an event than someone who believes the injection just saved his or her life. This is pretty much a given.

And the authors of the JAMA study “Reports of COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events in Predominantly Republican vs Democratic States” concede this point in the body of their text where they write that “the results are consistent with a relative overreporting of vaccine AEs among Republicans or a relative underreporting among Democrats.”

So the underreporting percentage for those states with a “10 percent increase in Democrat voting” was what?

Needless to say, the study doesn’t answer that question.  Could it be because there is no way of knowing what number of AEs are to be expected when a new and little-tested medical treatment is unleashed in the marketplace?

So what we really have here is a study claiming something is being overreported without any standard established to determine what is overreported and what is underreported.

With more people in red states reporting AEs than in blue states, could it be that Democrats, many of whom want to believe the vaccines were magic bullets, are wildly underreporting AEs and the higher numbers being reported by Republicans are a record of the actual numbers of AEs and not overreported at all?

The question doesn’t seem out of line given that Dr. Robert Redfield, the now-retired director of the CDC who was at the helm of the agency when the Operation Warp Speed campaign to find a vaccine began, last week went public with his belief that side effects from the vaccines have been badly underreported.

“Those of us that tried to suggest there may be significant side effects from vaccines…we kind of got canceled because no one wanted to talk about the potential that there was a problem from the vaccines, because they were afraid that that would cause people not to want to get vaccinated,” he told former CNN talking head Chris Cuomo who is now a podcaster at News Nation.

That statement alone is an indictment of just how much pandemic politics have corrupted science, but Redfield didn’t stop there.

He went on to observe that although the vaccines were and are “important for the most vulnerable people, those over 60, 65 years of age. They really aren’t that critical for those that are under 50 or younger….Those vaccines saved a lot of lives, but they also – we have to be honest – some people got significant side effects from the vaccine.”

Those “some people” are likely to include both Republicans and Democrats, not to mention people in the country’s by far major voting bloc – independents.  So it could be, as the authors of the JAMA report claim, that Republicans are overreporting AEs due to their suspicions about the vaccines. But it could also be Democrats are underreporting them because they believe their lives, or the lives of their children, were saved by the vaccines.

Some seem to seriously believe the latter, though, the odds, except in the case of children already suffering from serious co-morbidities, are so low that Sweden now prevents the vaccination of children under the age of 12 unless they have serious comorbidities and other European countries where risk assessment appears better than in the U.S. are starting to follow the same approach.

Risk assessment

“Whilst in the USA the CDC recommends COVID-19 vaccines for everyone over the age of 6 months, in the UK and European Union, COVID-19 vaccination is generally reserved for children aged five or over with significant co-morbidities who have an increased risk of severe COVID-19, and in some countries for children living with someone who has a weakened immune system,” researchers writing in the European Journal of Pediatrics observed in January.

“The low risk of severe illness in otherwise healthy children means that even small risks of vaccination must be taken into consideration,” especially given that “any potential benefit in preventing viral transmission is marginal and short-lived,” they noted in their conclusions.

The argument for vaccinating children living with someone with a weakened immune system parallels the argument for vaccinating all children in the U.S. to protect their elders, notably teachers, from infection, but the vaccines have proven less than ideal in stopping the spread of the virus.

As to U.S. deaths, the CDC reports 1,696 deaths among those aged 0-17 from 2020 through 2023. Motor vehicle deaths in 2020 and 2021 alone killed more children in the 0-13 age group, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), and traffic deaths increase dramatically among teenagers.

There is no complete statistical breakdown of traffic deaths for those age 13 to 17 easily available for 2020 and 2021, but the IIHS data would indicate about 3,000 in the 13 to 17 age group died in motor vehicle crashes in those two years. That would bring the total death toll for ages 0-17 to approximately 4,700 for the two years prior to 2023.

Preliminary data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) indicates about 41,000 Americans were killed in motor vehicle crashes in 2023. If historical percentages for the number of deaths by age hold, the number of the 0-17 age group dead in motor vehicle crashes from 2020 to 2023 would number somewhere around 7,000 – or more than four times the Covid-19 death rate for that age group.

But few political entities in the U.S. want to make the roads safer by doing anything other than adding ever-more armor to motor vehicles as if they were tanks, which forces ever more people into motor vehicles for “safety” reasons that compound the long list of medical problems Americans now face because they spend so much time sitting on their asses. 

Parents concerned about the safety of their children might want to worry less about Covid-19 and pay more attention to their children’s physical fitness, their own attentiveness when driving with kids in the car,  and especially the behavior of their children once the latter are licensed to drive.

“Unintentional injury” is the leading cause of death for those aged 15 to 24 in this country, according to the CDC, with motor vehicle crashes responsible for the bulk of those injuries.

“Teen drivers have crash rates nearly four times those of drivers 20 and older per mile driven,” according to the IIHS. “Risk is highest at age 16. Based on data from the 2016-17 National Household Travel Survey, the crash rate per mile driven is just over one and a half times as high for 16 year olds as it is for 18-19 year olds.”

Americans, unfortunately, are bad at risk assessment. They tend to underrate many of the dangers stalking them regularly – like driving and the many diseases linked to lack of exercise and obesity – and they tend to overrate the risks of the new and novel such as both Covid-19 and the Covid-19 vaccines AEs.

Given this, the reality would seem likely that Republicans, who generally appear more skeptical of the vaccines than Democrats, are overreporting AEs, and Democrats, who generally appeared to see the vaccines as life-saving marvels of modern science, are underreporting AEs to a similar degree.

It’s that old nocebo/placebo issue. It is part of the inherent prejudice of humans to see what they want to see unconsciously as well as consciously.

The scientists involved with JAMA study on AEs fell victim to this pitfall. But scientists aren’t supposed to do so. Science is supposed to be based on evidence that allows it to rise above simple human emotion.

The craziest thing here is that these scientists actually seemed to recognize this, and then they ignored it. The conclusion at the end of their study says this:

“The association between observation and belief runs both ways. The adage ‘seeing is believing’ recognizes that our individual experiences inform our sense of truth, and ‘believing is seeing’ recognizes that our preconceptions modulate what we experience in the first place. In finding that Republican-inclined states show higher COVID-19 AE reporting than Democrat-inclined states, this study suggests that Republicans are more likely to perceive or report those AEs and that Democrats are less likely to.”

Then why not report the percentage to which Democrats are underreporting instead of trying to create the suggestion there is some sort of misguided, Republican-biased conspiracy to undermine Covid-19 vaccines by reporting large numbers of AEs real or imagined?

One cannot help but wonder about how much good intentions entered the picture. Large numbers of reported AEs could indeed be bad if they discouraged some old codger saddled with multiple co-morbidities from getting vaccinated and boosted.  But old codgers are already closing in on the end anyway.

And it’s not bad if young, fit and healthy Americans are allowed to make their own decisions as to the value of Covid-19 vaccinations. Some people believe that they shouldn’t put drugs into their bodies unless there is a very good reason to do so, and that isn’t a bad belief in today’s over-medicated American society.

Portraying AEs as misreported because of political affiliations, however,  is not the biggest problem with studies like this one in JAMA. The big problem with studies like this is that playing politics with science undermines the faith people put in science and scientists.

And the country needs faith in science because without it, countries don’t advance. Without science, countries cease to become world leaders and other countries replace them on the world stage. And some of the countries out there now wanting to replace the U.S., including the one in which the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from whatever means, are bad actors.