MEMPHIS, Tenn. — In tonight’s Ransom Note: I heard a new one today. “If you get the COVID vaccine, you’re 60 times more likely to get lupus.
We can verify that is false.
But what is true, unfortunately, is that among all the factors to explain what drives differences in vaccination rates, partisanship is the only one playing more of a role than ever.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation and published by Axios, the gap in vaccination rates between counties that voted for Biden and counties that voted for Trump has increased more than 500 percent just since April.
In April, Biden counties only had a 2.2 percent higher vaccination rate than counties voting for Trump.
The following month, the gap increased to 6.5 percent.
And now, the gap is the highest yet at 11.7 percent.
The study concludes it’s not helping that some public figures keep pushing the idea that if you’ve been previously infected, you don’t need the vaccine.
The Delta variant is proving how false that really is.
Politics has played too much of a role in this public health crisis from the beginning and it needs to stop.
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