The Republican anti-vaxx campaign has been incredibly successful [at getting Republican voters killed]

Wow, did Ron DeSantis ever win the pandemic!

Until now, we’ve known that covid-19 death rates were higher among the unvaccinated, and also higher in counties that went for Donald Trump, whose supporters were more likely to resist vaccinations, masks and other pandemic precautions.

Now that the omicron wave is over, a couple of new analyses of state-by-state data both point to an inescapable conclusion: Living in states run by a Republican governor is dangerous to your health.

Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, consultant Doug Haddix reported Sunday that since July 1 (when the lifesaving vaccine was widely available), the 14 states with the highest death rates were all run by Republican governors. This included Florida (at about 153 deaths per 100,000 residents), Ohio (142 deaths per 100,000), Arizona (138) and Georgia (134). Contrast that with the deep-blue District of Columbia (only 27 deaths per 100,000) and California (58 per 100,000).

For verification, I checked with health-care analyst Charles Gaba, whose data on covid-19 and voting patterns has been widely cited. He ran the numbers for me using data mostly from Johns Hopkins and found similar results. The 16 states with the highest coronavirus death rates since July 1 were all run by Republicans. The worst was West Virginia (about 204 deaths per 100,000), followed closely by Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wyoming and the aforementioned Florida.

The states with the lowest death rates, by contrast, were all run by Democrats — or, in the case of Vermont, Maryland and Massachusetts, by moderate Republican governors who had heavily Democratic legislatures and embraced vaccines and masks. The best jurisdictions were D.C., Vermont, Hawaii and California. Looking at data from the period since May 1 (by which time all U.S. adults theoretically could have been vaccinated) produced similar results.

Florida residents were, since vaccines have been widely available, nearly seven times as likely to die from covid-19 as residents of D.C., nearly three times as likely to die as residents of California and 2½ times as likely to die as residents of New York. With Florida’s population of about 22 million, that’s a lot of unnecessary deaths.

If your highly successful anti-public-health campaign gets you a few more House seats in the 2022 midterms, was it all worth it? What if I told you that the libs were totally owned?