The results in a new medical study bolster the reputations of the nine national leaders who shared the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for Medical Education.
That prize was awarded to Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan, for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can.
The new study is: “Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” by Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason L. Schwartz, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, epub 2023. After vaccines became available against Covid-19, most Republican politicians strongly discouraged their voters from getting vaccinated. Most Democratic politicians strongly urged everyone to get the vaccine.
Here are highlights from the study:
- Objective To assess political party affiliation and mortality rates for individuals during the initial 22 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Results Between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2021, there were 538 159 individuals in Ohio and Florida who died at age 25 years or older in the study sample…. After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from −0.9 percentage point (95% PI, −2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters.
An unrelated historical note about Alexander Lukashenko
That 2020 Ig Nobel Prize was the second Ig Nobel Prize awarded to Alexander Lukashenko.
The 2013 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, AND to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.