"Stand with the facts" is an empty slogan

This weekend, I saw some reference to a study purporting to show that death rates from Covid-19 were higher in counties which voted for Trump than counties which voted for Biden.  It seemed like the typical feckless innumeracy which is not worth investigating since the flaws are so apparent.

The confounds you have to control for between Biden voting counties and Trump voting counties are 1) location (rural versus urban), 2) income, 3) morbidity, 4) education attainment, 5) ease of access to medical system, 6) cumulative seasonality cycle, 7) race/class/culture, etc.  

Is there a difference in the Covid-19 death rate between counties which voted for Biden and those which voted for Trump?  It is possible, but my deep suspicion is that when you control for education, income, location, where in the seasonality of the infection cycle a location is, etc., the difference in death rate disappears.

I caught an NPR broadcast this morning and they referenced the study in a way suggesting that it was their study.  As indeed it was.  From Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame.  

The trend was robust, even when controlling for age, which is the primary demographic risk of COVID-19 mortality. The data also reveal a major contributing factor to the death rate difference: The higher the vote share for Trump, the lower the vaccination rate.

The analysis only looked at the geographic location of COVID-19 deaths. The exact political views of each person taken by the disease remains unknowable. But the strength of the association, combined with polling information about vaccination, strongly suggests that Republicans are being disproportionately affected.

Recent polling data that show Republicans are now the largest group of unvaccinated individuals in the United States, more than any other single demographic group. Polling also shows that mistrust in official sources of information and exposure to misinformation, about both COVID-19 and the vaccines, run high among Republicans.

 

So of the at least seven critical factors contributing to death rates, they only control for one.  Without those controls, all conclusions are suspect.  Fruit of the poisoned tree as it were.

NPR published a flawed study which does not control for most of the factors affecting death rate and then uses the article to single out Republicans for blame.  And again, NPR cannot say whether the red counties have a higher death rate because they are Trump voters or because they lean towards the working class, have worse morbidity, less health access, have a different seasonality, etc.  

It is a bogus study with a completely inadequate methodology to reach the conclusion they wish to reach.  And the article is blindly and grossly partisan - Republicans are to blame.  

On this morning's broadcast, they managed to make it even worse.  Having done deeply flawed research to reach a deeply partisan conclusion unsupported by the pertinent data, they then characterized and lamented to Fauci just how bad it was that there was so much partisan misinformation and how that was precluding 100% vaccination.  Conducting deeply flawed research in order to try and blame the opposing party while complaining about the rise in partisan misinformation seems similar to a parricidal murderer claiming clemency from a court for being an orphan.  

"Stand with the facts" is their slogan and it is an empty slogan.