Red or Blue Mortality Rates

SciAm pretends that there's a significant Red/Blue Mortality gap, and it's about policies.

SciAm pretends that there's a significant Red/Blue Mortality gap, and it's about policies. (1) The gap is small (2) they ignore cultural, population density, race, diet, exercise, and all other things to jump to policy. That's not Science (statistics), or looking at the data, that's political advocacy.

ℹ️ Info

~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2022-07-18

Facts

In a really bad article heading, "People in Republican Counties Have Higher Death Rates Than Those in Democratic Counties", and subhead, "A growing mortality gap between Republican and Democrat areas may largely stem from policy choices", both are highly questionable.

Their first point to leap to their conclusion is rather spurious data on Hospitalization and Death rates due to COVID, and assuming it was Mask/Vaccine mandates that caused those differences -- not race, culture, age, geography, etc. The #1 variances in outcome was usually age or comorbidities -- and the data they use doesn't look at those. So jumping to the conclusion that it was because of policy, is not science. Then using that to back up their claim that age-adjusted overall differences are because of policy as well, is not science. Their biggest and first point is a non-sequitur. ^[1]

They use a BMJ (British Medical Journal) paper titled, "Political environment and mortality rates in the United States, 2001-19: population based cross sectional analysis." to support their point. It has a low confidence interval, and was in a publication that is considered bias left. (Being openly anti-Brexit, etc). Most of all, the article doesn't appear to adjust for income, race, rurality (distance to healthcare), culture (how willing they are to see a doctor), or political affiliation -- they generalize based on the county you live in. That's not good science. ^[2]

Then they leap to a new study, Political orientation, political environment, and health behaviors in the United States. The synopsis of the article is really bad, and the article is paywall blocked. But the summary of the article is a mess, "a fourfold increase in the mortality gap between those living in Republican and Democratic areas"... that sounds large, until you look that the difference was small, and is still quite small, just 4 times larger than it was. The biased BMJ puts a craptastic OpEd piece to do with the "Study" that lets you know they blame things like gun control, and a lack of Social Programs in red states, that lets you know BMJ's bias once again. ^[3]

Then they start blathering that Firearm Death rates have something to do with it. Pretend you know the basics of the topic -- and you know the vast majority of this is NOT murder rate, it's suicide rate. Because people in red states are older, and more prone to have terminal illnesses (or death of a spouse, etc), and thus more likely to commit suicide. Fewer people can afford to live out their golden years in Hawaii or New York, so they move to Florida. Either the author doesn't know that, and is incompetent. Or she does and glosses over it, because the political agenda is more important than educating her readers.

I'm left with such a bad taste in my mouth, that if I had a subscription to Scientific American, I'd just cancel it as a waste of time. And I know to be on the lookout for the author (Lydia Denwroth) as scientifically incompetent, or a political polemicist pretending to be a journalist. Looking at her non-existant pedigree, I get that she's just a mouthpiece for the left, and not a critical thinker or skeptic.