Role party affiliation played in 1 million COVID deaths

COVID-19 has now claimed the lives of 1 million Americans — a grim milestone made worse by the fact probably a third of those fatalities could have been avoided. Estimates suggest more than 318,000 deaths from the disease occurred among individuals who had access to vaccines, but chose not to receive any.

With such a devastating pandemic sweeping the country, and the globe, why would so many Americans forego a potentially life-saving vaccine?

One key answer to this question is — as with much in the U.S. today — partisan politics.

Since vaccines for COVID-19 first became available, polls have consistently shown Republicans are much less likely than Democrats to be vaccinated or to want to be vaccinated. According to monthly surveys conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, this partisan gap has averaged more than 30 percentage points between May 2021 and April 2022.

But the story is both more complicated and wide-ranging than it first appears. We know party and ideology account for many of the differences in the lives of Americans.

Our research finds that not only is party affiliation a powerful predictor of vaccine willingness, it also contributes to other attitudes that promote or inhibit willingness to be vaccinated, giving it added power.

In two surveys we conducted in March and June of 2021, we found party affiliation affected COVID-19 vaccination preferences independently of some of the standard influences such as education, age and race. That means party alone can help determine whether a person got a vaccination.

What we also found, however, is partisanship has additional effects on vaccination status and willingness. That’s because it contributes to other factors that also affect willingness to get vaccinations, and so contributes “indirectly” to willingness as well as directly.

These indirect factors included the impact of partisanship on one’s concern for contracting COVID-19 oneself; concern for others contracting it; trust in government; trust in scientists and medical professionals; and conspiracy theories surrounding the vaccine — namely the vaccine would insert a tracking microchip into the body and it could cause sterility.

Party affiliation influenced Americans’ attitudes in each of these areas, which in turn affected a person’s willingness to get a COVID-19 vaccine. This basically multiplies the effect party affiliation has over vaccinations.

Republicans and Democrats haven’t always felt this differently about potentially life-saving vaccines.

A review of historical public opinion trends during other health crises shows in 1954, Republicans were roughly equally as likely — only 3 percentage points less — as Democrats to say they were willing to get the then-new polio vaccine.

The vaccine hesitancy gap between the parties for the Asian flu vaccine in 1957 was somewhat larger, but still a far cry from today’s gap — Democrats were 9 points more likely to get that vaccine. For the swine flu vaccine in 1976, Democrats were 4 points more likely to get the vaccine.

But since 2000, there have been double-digit partisan gaps in willingness to accept other vaccines to address public health crises. When the administration of George W. Bush raised the possibility of reintroducing the smallpox vaccine in 2002, Republicans were 11 points less likely than Democrats to say they would get the vaccine. During the swine flu pandemic in 2009, this difference grew to 15 points. Most recently, initial reaction in a July 2020 Gallup Poll to the promise of a new COVID-19 vaccine produced a gap of 34 points: 81 percent of Democrats said they were likely to get the vaccine compared to just 47 percent of Republicans.

While there’s no way to definitively tell if Republicans are dying from COVID-19 at higher rates than Democrats as a result of these discrepancies, there are numbers that suggest it. An ABC News analysis shows after vaccines became readily available, states that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 had an average of 38 percent higher death rates due to COVID-19 than states that voted for Joe Biden.

Polling data shows throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Republicans were consistently more likely than Democrats to report a great deal of confidence in the scientific community.

In the mid-1980s, however, prominent Republican leaders began to publicly disparage scientific input on public policy issues — initially about the acid rain debate, then expanding to other topics.

Elected officials and other policymakers planning for future threats would be wise to keep in mind the depth of the ongoing partisan divide on vaccination.

For example, while state and federal officials made a point of doing specialized outreach to boost COVID-19 vaccination rates in low-income communities and communities of color, specialized outreach may also be appropriate on the basis of partisan affiliation. Furthermore, such outreach needs to consider a prominent hurdle to overcome among Republicans is a deficit in trust in medical professionals specifically — and science more generally.