Vaccine politics may be tied to excess GOP deaths, study finds

The political maelstrom swirling around coronavirus vaccines may be to blame for a higher rate of excess deaths among registered Republicans in Ohio and Florida during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published Monday.

The report in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine underscores the partisan divide over coronavirus vaccines that have saved lives but continued to roil American politics even as the pandemic has waned.

Yale University researchers found that registered Republicans had a higher rate of excess deaths than Democrats in the months following when vaccines became available for all adults in April 2021. The study does not directly attribute the deaths to COVID-19. Instead, excess mortality refers to the overall rate of deaths exceeding what would be expected from historical trends.

The study examined the deaths of 538,139 people 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio, between January 2018 and December 2021, with researchers linking them to party registration records. Researchers found the excess death rate for Republicans and Democrats was about the same at the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

Both parties experienced a sharp but similar increase in excess deaths the following winter. But after April 2021, the gap in excess death rates emerged, with the rate for Republicans 7.7 percentage points higher than the rate for Democrats. For Republicans, that translated into a 43 percent increase in excess deaths.

Researchers said the gap in excess death rates was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates and noted that the gap was primarily driven by voters in Ohio.

The results suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and the uptake among Republican and Democratic voters ‘‘may have been factors in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic’’ in the United States.

In their paper, Yale researchers Jacob Wallace, Jason L. Schwartz, and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham cautioned the data did not include individual causes of death or whether someone had been vaccinated. The data did not look at voters who had no party affiliation and was limited to Florida and Ohio, which aren’t neat comparisons to other states.

The excess death rates between groups could be affected by other factors, such as differences in education, race, ethnicity, underlying conditions, and access to health care, said Wallace, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health and the lead author.