
“It’s possible that thousands of deaths that could have been averted,” he said.ĭespite this, Wallace said he and the other researchers are glad the study has received widespread attention because the coverage focuses on what still needs to be done to address the gap in vaccination rates and to continue probing the risk factors that drive COVID-19 mortality and determine which ones are amenable to intervention. And as a public health policy professional, he finds it particularly troubling because the data suggest that, with higher vaccination rates, deaths could potentially have been averted at a low cost. Wallace said the paper tells “a very sad story” because many of the deaths may have been avoidable. There are still over 70 million Americans who have yet to receive even their first dose of a COVID vaccine, who have rejected it all this time. The research showed that the gap between Republican and Democratic excess death “increased significantly after COVID vaccinations were readily available,” Goldsmith-Pinkham said. They then calculated excess death rates controlling for differences in mortality rates pre-COVID.
#HAVE THERE BEEN ANY DEATHS FROM COVID VACCINE REGISTRATION#
In conducting the research, the research team compared individual voter registration records from 2017 with death records from 2018 to 2021 for Ohio and Florida, Goldsmith-Pinkham said. “It will prolong and worsen the future of the pandemic if we continue to have this large segment of the population unvaccinated - particularly given the clusters of unvaccinated individuals in certain communities, certain regions, certain states - who remain highly susceptible to those severe outcomes.” “The public health community can't give up on the hard work of trying to continue to make progress with those who are unvaccinated - hard as it is, intractable as many of those individuals appear to be at this point,” said Schwartz. The findings should also serve as a rallying cry for public health professionals to continue their push to make sure people are vaccinated to protect themselves from the ongoing threat of COVID-19, Schwartz said. “Those individuals remain at dramatically increased risk of severe outcomes, including death.” “Even as we continue to hear and talk a lot about booster campaigns, the updated booster, and trying to reach folks with their third or fourth or fifth dose, there are still over 70 million Americans who have yet to receive even their first dose of a COVID vaccine, who have rejected it all this time,” Schwartz said. Schwartz said the findings amplify the critical importance of vaccines. The findings have been reported extensively in national media including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NBC News. The study’s findings were recently released as a working paper by the researchers in collaboration with the National Bureau of Economic Research. “The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available,” the authors said in the study. After COVID-19 vaccines became widely available, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 percentage points to 10.4 percentage points.


The study found that overall, the excess death rate for Republican voters was 5.4 percentage points, or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters. The authors estimated excess death rates as the percentage increase in deaths above expected deaths due to seasonality, geographic location, party affiliation, and age. Schwartz, associate professor of public health (health policy) and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, assistant professor at the Yale School of Management conducted the research using a novel linkage of political party affiliation and mortality data to assess whether there were differences in COVID-19 excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters. Jacob Wallace, assistant professor of public health (health policy) Jason L. The discrepancy didn’t exist prior to the vaccines. states had more excess deaths than Democratic voters after vaccines for COVID-19 became widely available to counter the disease. A team of Yale researchers has found that Republican voters in two U.S.
