Opinion | Are anti-vax Republican voters killing themselves off?

Do you suppose this is the way America will finally be rid of Donald Trump?

Statistics show that Republicans are experiencing higher death rates than Democrats these days, apparently attributable to so many of them refusing to get vaccinated for Covid and other diseases.

According to a story last week in the Washington Post, polling has shown that Republicans remain disproportionately skeptical of coronavirus vaccines, a position sometimes amplified by GOP politicians: 55% of Republican respondents vowed that they would “definitely not get” the vaccine compared with 12% of Democrats.

On top of that, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ surgeon general issued a health bulletin calling for a halt to using mRNA coronavirus vaccines, contending that the shots could contaminate patients’ DNA — a claim that has been roundly debunked by public health experts, federal officials and the vaccine companies.

The Post’s story pointed out that Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo’s announcement came after months of back-and-forth with federal regulators who have repeatedly rebuked his rhetoric about vaccines. Public health experts warn of the dangers of casting doubt on proven lifesaving measures as viruses surge with the onset of winter.

“We’ve seen this pattern from Dr. Ladapo that every few months he raises some new concern and it quickly gets debunked,” Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s public health school who led the White House’s national coronavirus response before stepping down last year, told the paper. “This idea of DNA fragments — it’s scientific nonsense. People who understand how these vaccines are made and administered understand that there is no risk here.”

But, like the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, the nonsense over the vaccines — which have proven to have saved perhaps millions of lives — refuses to die.

That a high-ranking official in DeSantis’ administration is making such bogus claims says volumes about the Florida governor himself. The blustering DeSantis is desperately trying to save his presidential campaign, but he’s been unable to make a dent in Trump’s big lead among Republicans.

Perhaps he’s hoping that his surgeon general, who has long been involved in health conspiracy theories, will help endear him to more of Trump’s supporters.

Ladapo’s claims are grounded in politics, not science, said David Gorski, a Wayne State University professor of surgery and oncology and managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, which debunks misinformation in medicine.

“I’ve never seen a state health authority parrot anti-vaccine disinformation as a justification for stopping the use of a vaccine that has saved so many lives before,” Gorski told the Post. “The Republican Party has adopted anti-vaccine, anti-public health ideology of this sort as part of its belief system.”

The silver lining? That ideology might whittle down the number of voters who would put these idiots in office.