Study finds Holocaust-related deaths much higher in Nazi-controlled countries

That is a terribly tasteless headline, and LGM apologizes to everyone in the world for it, but look at this long hand-wringing piece from the Atlantic, which comes to the sorrowful conclusion that hundreds of thousands of Republicans have died from COVID who would be alive today if not for the Republican party’s COVID policies.

I mean if I keep randomly spraying automatic weapons fire into crowded spaces and you don’t, I doubt we’re going to need a federally funded study to conclude that, all things being equal, I’ve caused a lot more randomly spraying automatic weapons fire deaths than you have.

It was perfectly evident by a year ago last spring that the vaccines were safe and worked, and that people who didn’t get vaccinated were going to be exponentially more likely to die of COVID than people who did. The latest CDC figures show that unvaccinated Americans are 11 times more likely to die of COVID than fully vaccinated — meaning double boosted — people, which means that by now we should be looking at something like 35 deaths per day, aka a relatively mild flu season, instead of the current 400 COVID deaths per day.

I mean I understand that there’s scientific value in trying to pin down the precise answer to the question of the exact dimensions of the Republican party’s mass murder of its own constituents, but that what has in fact since happened was what was going to happen was as predictable at the time as water flowing downhill.

Even so, check out this nonsense:

The absolute number of Republican deaths is less important than the fact that they happened needlessly. Vaccines could have saved lives. And yet, the party that describes itself as pro-life campaigned against them. Democrats are not without fault, though. The Biden administration’s COVID blunders are no doubt to blame for some of the nation’s deaths. But on the whole, Democratic leaders have mostly not promoted ideas or enforced policies around COVID that actively chip away at life expectancy. It is a tragedy that the Republican push against basic lifesaving science has cut lives short and continues to do so. The partisan divide in COVID deaths, Hanage said, is just “another example of how the partisan politics of the U.S. has poisoned the well of public health.”

Leave aside the classic both-siding, where the Biden’s administration less than perfect COVID policy is compared to a national anti-vaccination campaign led by mass murderer Ron DeSantis et. al. for the sake of “balance.” The really infuriating part is blaming this carnage on partisan politics.

Hundreds of thousands of easily preventable COVID deaths in the USA over the last two years were caused and continue to be caused by THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. Not by “partisan politics,” which have existed for the nation’s entire history, unlike one of the nation’s two major parties being opposed to vaccination, which is something that just happened for the first time two years ago.

Again:

The anti-science messaging that fuels such a divide is popular with Republican leaders because it plays so well with their constituents. Far-right crowds cheer for missed vaccine targets and jokes about executing scientific leaders. In an environment where partisanship trumps all—including trying to save people’s lives—such messaging is both politically effective and morally abhorrent. The data, however imperfect, demand a reckoning with the consequences of such a strategy not only during the pandemic but over the past few decades, and in the years to come. But to acknowledge how many Republicans didn’t have to die would mean giving credence to scientific and medical expertise. So long as America remains locked in a poisonous partisan battle in which science is wrongly dismissed as being associated with the left, the death toll will only rise.

Science is not wrongly associated with the left! “Believing in science” — in an appropriately nuanced and sociologically skeptical rather than naively credulous way — is in fact a left wing position in this country at this time. Anti-science pig ignorance and bigotry is in fact a right wing position in this country at this time.

Yes you can find left-wing anti-science cranks, just as you can find plenty of individual conservatives who aren’t science skeptical. But as an ideological matter, the Democratic party supports science and the Republican party opposes it.

Good luck trying to publish those words in a Very Serious and Respectable Mainstream Magazine.