The NPR Politics Podcast - The High Cost Of Vaccine Conspiracies

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

An NPR analysis finds that people living in counties which strongly supported Donald Trump in the 2020 election could be three times more likely to die of coronavirus than those in counties which strongly supported Joe Biden. That difference appears to be driven by partisan differences in vaccination rates, as vaccine conspiracies spread among far-right voters. This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, senior Science editor and correspondent Geoffrey Brumfiel, and White House correspondent Scott Detrow.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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And we are standing outside of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and it's definitely leaning. It's a little disconcerting, actually. Who knows how long it's still going to be standing up, so we figured we'd catch it now. Yep. This podcast was recorded at 1.36 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, December 6th. Things may have changed by the time you listen to it. Okay, here's the show. Bye-bye. Ciao. But that tower, I'm sure, will still be leaning. Hasn't it been that way for God knows how many centuries? It's in good shape.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. And today on the show, Jeff Brumfield from NPR's science team is joining us. Thanks for coming on, Jeff. Hey, it's nice to be here. So we're going to be talking about COVID today. And before we dive into any news, I just want to say in good faith, I don't know that I can really host a podcast all about COVID without being straight up with y'all, without being straight up to listeners. I tested positive for COVID-19 last week. I think Scott knows that. I'm feeling fine. I was vaccinated. It was a routine White House test. My kids, husband, everybody is negative, but they are now home

for 14 days. So you may or may not hear them all in the background. But I just felt like I should mention that. I'm glad it stayed mild. And I've really been feeling for you the last week and over the next week. I appreciate it. And I appreciate that lasagna you brought over last night. Thank you. Well, Jeff, you have been reporting on COVID misinformation. And that's why I want to start the show today and the overlap that we see with COVID misinformation and pro-Trump Republicans. A few months ago, Eric Trump, the son of former President Donald Trump, was at a conference speaking out against vaccine mandates. But a lot of the other speakers at the event were actually pushing far more, I would say, dangerous disinformation. Yeah, that's right. That's right. This is a conference that gets put on every year by a couple named Ty and Charlene Bollinger. They've been labeled by one watchdog group as

misinformation super spreaders. And they've had this conference going on for years now. And basically some of the biggest names in the anti-vaccine community go there. And I heard some pretty far out ideas while I was there that, for example, the vaccines contain some sort of nanotechnology that will modify your brainstem, like the matrix, and make you into a cyborg. Fact check, not true. But there was some really far out stuff. And Eric Trump was there giving what sounded an awful lot like a political speech. Yeah. And Jeff, you've published some really eye-opening, stark stories on NPR over the last couple days. And I'll just read you the headline from one of them. Pro-Trump counties now have a far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame. And you quoted an expert in the story.

It really jumped out to me. If people are OG politics podcast listeners, they might remember there was a period where I covered, you know, micro-targeting and tech trends like that. And I remember one of the things that experts said was you can get all these data points, but so much of them don't matter.

Like if you know somebody's zip code and whether they went to college, you've already got a pretty good sense of who they are. And that's why this quote really just like hit me in the face. It was basically somebody saying, if I could ask one piece of information to guess whether someone is vaccinated or not is to ask whether they're Democrat or Republican makes zero sense to me emotionally and intellectually. And honestly, that was a big part of what drove me forward. I mean, I've been tracking misinformation and vaccine hesitancy for several months. And at the beginning, this trend wasn't there. I mean, Jeff, how do you explain this growing partisanship that you say you didn't

see at the outset? Was it just that at the beginning, we didn't have the numbers of people getting vaccinated, you couldn't tell or the partisanship itself, you feel has become a growing defining feature as a result of the misinformation campaigns that you've been talking about? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a little bit of both. So, I mean, partisanship has obviously been a feature of the pandemic throughout. Like, I'm not going to pretend that politics don't play a huge role in things like masking and sort of public policies about what stays open and what doesn't. I think in talking to people, there's a few interesting things going on. So one is that other vaccine-hesitant groups were fearful about the vaccines, but they were also

very fearful of COVID. And they thought COVID was really dangerous. And in the end, that fear seems to have overwhelmed whatever concerns they had about vaccines, and they decided to get vaccinated. Many people did. There are still hesitant people in all different groups of America, but that seems to be the dominant trend. Conservatives, though, seem to underestimate the risk of COVID. And that, in part, is due to misinformation. And really, sort of how I ended up going to this conference and ended up at this nexus, that misinformation is sort of serving a dual purpose, I feel. I think the anti-vaccine people have found a real audience, but I think that there are elements, and I want to emphasize elements, of the Republican Party that also see an opportunity to use vaccines as a political issue. You know, Jeff, you've been describing this conference

where there were a number of high-profile, far-right Republicans speaking. But, you know, there are also a number of Republicans who are vaccinated who do not believe this disinformation. And what are you hearing from that subset of the population? I mean, how actually politically strategic do you think this is for Republicans? That's an excellent point.

I'm really glad you brought that up. I mean, the fact is roughly 60% of Republicans say they are vaccinated. So a majority, it's just that's way below the roughly 90% of Democrats who say they're vaccinated. So there are plenty of Republicans who've taken the shot. And there are plenty who think that it's the right thing to do. One of them is a woman I spoke to up in Minnesota. Her name is Annette Meeks. She is with the Freedom Foundation

of Minnesota, which is sort of a conservative think tank. They just care about winning. It's the worst element in American politics today. You know, she sees these vaccines, you know, saving lives, and she sees people she knows refusing to take them. She also, by the way, thinks that this could end up being a losing political strategy. Well, I guess it might work in solid red states like Alabama, but in swing states like Minnesota and several others, they're going to make it really difficult for our candidates because that's not a message that plays well to our suburban independent swing voters. And that's because suburban independent swing voters tend to be vaccinated. And so they don't really buy a lot of this misinformation. I mean, I think that's true. I also think there are a lot of other swirling factors right now

that have those suburban swing voters pretty skeptical of the Democrats in power as well. And I also think, like, you could talk about this with the fact that the election was not stolen. It was a free, fair election that Biden won. You could look at the Mueller investigation and the aftermath. I feel like there are so many things out there right now where the people trying to discredit the factual thing that clearly happened spend so much time and energy and are so passionate about their misinformation. And the people repeating the truth just kind of run out of steam or disengage with the conversation. Then I feel like you have this lopsided thing where this minority wrong view almost takes hold in a way in certain quarters and like hardens into fact, which again, it is not fact.

All right. Well, let's take a quick break and we'll have lots more to talk about. You're reporting, Jeff, when we get back in just a minute. And we're back. And let's talk now about the consequences of the conservative energy behind vaccine misinformation. Jeff, your reporting has found that Republican voters are very likely to believe in correct information about vaccines, and folks in Trump-supporting parts of the country are therefore dying at a considerably higher rate than people elsewhere. I've got a couple follow--ups on that, but first just explain what it is that you found. Sure, sure. So my colleague Daniel Wood and I, we did an analysis basically comparing deaths in the population from COVID-19 to 2020 election results, which feels like a crazy sort of analysis to do. But what popped out was a very clear trend, which was that on average, counties in the U.S. that went heavily for President Trump, and by heavily, we define that as 60% or more for President Trump,

those counties had roughly three times the death rate of counties that went heavily for President Biden, 60% or more for Biden. So basically, what that shows is that there's this huge gap. And we also looked at vaccination, and we saw the exact inverse, right? So the Biden counties were much more highly vaccinated, and the Trump counties, on average, have much lower rates of vaccination. The other piece of sort of data we really brought into this was actually from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan think-take group that just showed really that Republicans are being pummeled with misinformation at an enormous rate. And as you

said, huge numbers of people who identify as Republican believe or think one or more false statements about COVID-19 might be true, or one or more false statements about the vaccines might be true. So you can't obviously prove everyone who's dying is of one party, and they're not. I mean, that's not the claim. But you can connect these dots, and you create a very compelling picture, especially when you go to a conference like this and you see, you know, Republican politicians far right. I want to emphasize that showing up, you know. I mean, how much is this correlation, though, or causation, Jeff? Because, you know, I think that when we look at red parts of the country and blue parts of the country, there's a lot of factors that make them different, right? We know that education levels often are higher amongst Democratic voters. You know, parts of the

Democratic base, you could argue, maybe are not as much at risk, right, for other factors. Maybe the obesity levels are lower in blue states versus red states. And I'm just curious, how do you feel confident that these other factors aren't playing into all this? No, exactly. I think that's an excellent point. It's something we spend a good deal of time thinking about. So we can't rule out that these other things you're mentioning, it seems fairly safe to spread throughout the country. It's now been flagged in more than a dozen states. Still a lot of questions about what exactly it does, about vaccines, about intensity of illness, lots of other things. I think the picture is going

to continue to be clear. Regardless of Omicron, though, more than 100,000 new COVID cases daily in the country right now, still predominantly that Delta strain we've been dealing with. Even without the unknowns of the Omicron variant, the Delta variant is still a major threat and the major driver of hospitalizations around the country right now. So I think it's important to keep that in mind. I mean, it's already not looking great for the second half of the winter here. You know, there are obviously a looking great for the second half of the winter here. You know, there are obviously a lot of health consequences with coronavirus that we've been talking about throughout this podcast.

But, Scott, we haven't actually discussed the president, President Biden, much in this conversation. And there are certainly political consequences for him. You know, his approval rating is underwater, despite having some success passing legislation in Congress and despite some success in fighting the pandemic. And now you've got this new variant. You've got this deepening partisan entrenchment that Jeff has been talking about and a lot of disinformation over the vaccine. And, you know, as much as we say we don't really know where the end is with this virus, I also look at it over the horizon. I'm like, I don't really understand what President Biden can do to fundamentally change the conversation at this point.

It's tough, especially, you know, even as somebody who has really enthusiastically embraced big, aggressive government, there's just not much he can do. There's just not much the federal government can do at this point. He continues to encourage people to get boosted. But, you know, we've talked a lot about the way that the constant shift in messaging on boosters and especially, I think, just loses a lot of people. And it's just kind of like, you know, Biden comes out and gives a speech and it seems to be like, I am trying to give the message I'm actively confronting this new variant

and everything else. But he kind of says the same thing every week at this point, because there's not, there aren't that many new tools in the toolbox. So I think it's, it's, it's not a position a white house wants to be in of just not having full control over what's going to happen next. All right. Jeff Brumfield,

senior editor and correspondent for NPR science team. Thanks so much for coming on today's show. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the white house. I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House

and Asma, hope you feel better real soon. Thank you. I appreciate it. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.