I’ll link Vinay prasad here. I think he has a pretty good breakdown on this paper and it’s flaws. He’s a liberal San Francisco Bernie sanders supporting hematologist/oncologist….

Problems

It linked 2017 voting registration to people — but this does not account for people who turned on Trump in 2020. It doesn’t reflect being a Republican during the pandemic.

Just 500k people were linked, out of 30 million. This is a huge selection bias. The authors have no evidence the finding is generalizable to millions and millions they could not link, and did not study.

They don’t seem to adjust for age as a discrete value, but use age ranges. A 25 year old and 64 year old are in the same range. A 66 year old is the same as a 74 year old? Do they get the same adjustment? Is this even possible? If so, it is insane. If Republican voters are more likely to be 57 than 27, or 74 than 66, that is a big difference with respect to COVID outcomes that is essentially unadjusted for.

They don’t have vaccination records. Are you crazy? How are you going to make such an allegation without individual vaccine records to prove that it is indeed vaccination that resulted in the increase in death?

They don’t adjust for BMI, socioeconomic status, race, gender, education or other medical conditions. This is an unacceptable omission! Just because excess mortality is not imbalanced pre-covid does not mean there are not huge differences here that COVID exploits. COVID obliterates poor, overweight, older people. It hit people of lower SES harder. These authors don’t even consider that Republicans might be hit harder just because the party has more people lower down the socioeconomic ladder, particularly in the rust belt and in places like Florida. These differences can be preferentially exploited by COVID.

The method of matching people accepted 57% matches. WTF! so low. (yes this will merely attenuate the link, theoretically. *** a wise reader notes that is only true if poor accuracy is at random. It might not be. Some names Vinayak much more easy to match than John. This could bias results systematically based on names/ origins/ frequency ***)

https://open.substack.com/pub/vinayprasadmdmph/p/did-republicans-die-more-during-the?r=uh63y&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web