To everyone arguing about NPR bias:
For the record, I am a liberal. Not on everything, but on most things. But even I, from my liberal perspective, have noticed the liberal bias on NPR. But here is how it is expressed. When they interview someone from the right, they have harder questions, and are more argumentative toward that person. When they interview someone from the left, they go easy on that person and generally give him relatively more time. Also they are liberal in their choice of what stories to run and what stories to ignore. So I see the liberal bias of NPR expressed in terms of the editorial decisions they make.
However, when it comes to straight factual data, most news organizations with a reputation to uphold, including NPR and Fox News, one on the left and one on the right, are quite careful to get facts correct if those facts can be easily checked by anyone. The risk to their reputation is just too high. The difference between Fox News and NPR in this Trump voter vs covid report is that NPR is more likely to run the story and Fox News more likely not to run it. More likely does not mean never. Even Fox News once in a while runs a story that is more favorable to the left than to the right, just not so often.
With all that out of the way, I will turn now to the statistics at hand regarding Trump voting and covid vaccines and deaths. I do not doubt the accuracy of the two scatter plots after the 3rd paragraph in the NPR story. I can discount any analysis they might have of these plots as possibly biased. But the plots themselves I trust because it is too easy to check them. From these plots I can see a strong correlation between Trump voting and low vaccination rates. That should be a surprise to no one. I can also see a strong correlation between Trump voting and higher death rates. What I do not conclude from these scatter plots is that voting for Trump causes more covid deaths. The straight left-leaning take on these plots is that they show Trump votes are stupidly rejecting science and refusing vaccination. This conclusion comes from confusing correlation with causation. Whenever two things, A and B, are correlated, there are three possibilities. (1) A causes B. (2) B causes A. (3) Both A and B are caused by a third factor, C. In this case, factor C is living in a rural area. People who live is a rural area are more likely to vote Republican. But what else can living in a rural area cause? Well, living in a rural area means that a new disease spread by community contact is slower to spread in such a place. Remember that the NPR scatter plots show deaths starting in May 2021. What happened before May 2021? Well, a lot happened. The pandemic spread the fastest in places of high population density. People in high population densities tend to vote Democrat. So the Democrats were made personally aware of the dangers of the pandemic by seeing their neighbors die from April 2020 to May 2021. It is no surprise that people that are closer to a disaster feel the immediate danger of that disaster more keenly than people who observe that disaster from a distance, like the rural Trump voters. So it is no surprise that they felt less motivation to get vaccinated. It is also true that hospital services in rural areas have fewer capabilities and are often inadequate for certain unusual situations, such as a once in 100 year pandemic. Therefore when rural people did start getting infected with covid they has fewer options for testing and treatment was further away. So their death rates would be higher than people who has more immediate access to medical care.
So far I have analyzed just one factor that could account for the correlations, but there could be more. While I personally believe being a Trump voter probably does make surviving covid less likely, I don't think the NPR story proves it
Just the opposite.
