Politics of health nowadays is deadly. Here on this Tuesday evening, the country is being ground into mush by a pandemic fueled in part by a huge faction of Americans sprouting bullshit from the Republican bullhorn, twisting facts into lies and killing 300,000-plus people.
The huge problem with getting a handle on COVID-19 is politics — the GOP has turned a health issue into a political one, using brainless nit-twits to flout rules and good sense.

Before recognizing Joe Biden as America’s next president, Mitch McConnell was careful to make sure President Donald Trump was in the loop https://t.co/fLSzUAxM97

— POLITICO (@politico) December 16, 2020

On one side, the ignorance of the T-Rump’s ‘stolen election’ bullshit has bled over into the health arena — six weeks late, MoscowMitch this morning framed a speech in simple terms that the “leader of the Senate recognizes reality,” but great damage has been done. And for a good time to come.
Backpedaling now even MoscowMitch ‘pleaded‘ with fellow GOPers not to feed the T-Rump beast, it’s because Biden is president-elect and Republicans ‘contempt for their own voters is bottomless.’

All this GOP crap about election fraud, and masks are unconstitutional and so forth, is also blowing beyond just health, as an analysis from Oregon Public Broadcasting this afternoon reveals this misinformation/lying harms national security:

At conferences, in op-eds and at agency meetings, domestic terrorism analysts are raising concern about the security implications of millions of conservatives buying into baseless right-wing claims.
They say the line between mainstream and fringe is vanishing, with conspiracy-minded Republicans now marching alongside armed extremists at rallies across the country.
Disparate factions on the right are coalescing into one side, analysts say, self-proclaimed “real Americans” who are cocooned in their own news outlets, their own social media networks and, ultimately, their own “truth.”

The T-Rump’s blather and continously, never-ending fight from defeat has even a hardcore Republican, GW Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson up in embattled arms as pronounced in an op/ed at The Washton Post yesterday

Much of what I believed is now suspect. Ideological stars that once seemed fixed to me have shifted, leaving an unfamiliar sky.

The intellectual bankruptcy and moral hypocrisy of many conservative leaders is stunning.
People who claimed to favor limited government now applaud Trump’s use of the executive branch to undermine an election.
A similar attempt by Barack Obama would have brought comparisons to Fidel Castro.
People who talked endlessly about respecting the Constitution affirm absurd slanders against the constitutional order.
People who claimed to be patriots now spread false claims about their country’s fundamental corruption.
People who talked of honoring the rule of law now jerk and gyrate according to the whims of a lawless leader.

This the kicker: ‘This is not just a failure in judgment; it indicates an absence of character. And the harm is compounded because conservative leaders are modeling political ethics for the next generation. Their shamelessness is likely to be replicated.‘

Beyond real politics and into the killing:

Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 6, 2020

In my news-surfing, doomscrolling this afternoon, I spied a couple of science/research articles signifying the trouble caused by Republicans/right-wing nut-jobs (both maybe the same) creating trouble with COVID-19 response with misinformation/disinformation to the virus and our daily lives, a deal leading to sickness and death.

First, via EurekaAlert yesterday, and the problem within my own state of California:

Young Californians who identify themselves as Republicans are less likely to follow social distancing guidelines that prevent coronavirus transmission than those who identify as Democrats or Independents, according to new USC study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The findings among 18- to 25-year-olds mirror what many have observed about America’s politicized response to COVID-19, and are a source of alarm for public health experts.
The United States is now averaging 207,000 new cases and 2,319 deaths per day, as of Friday.

“You might expect middle-aged or older adults to have established ideologies that affect their health behavior, but to see it in young adults who have historically been less politically inclined is unexpected,” said Adam Leventhal, director of the USC Institute for Addiction Science.
“Regardless of age, we would never hope to find results like this. Public health practices should not correlate with politics.”

In the second study some more signifance in that the horrible GOP propaganda hampers actual real response to the pandemic — from Science Magazine last Friday:

From the Abstract: ‘Rampant partisanship in the United States may be the largest obstacle to the reduced social mobility most experts see as critical to limiting the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Analyzing a total of just over 1.1 million responses collected daily between April 4th and September 10th reveals not only that partisanship is more important than public health concerns for explaining individuals’ willingness to stay-at-home and reduce social mobility, but also that the effect of partisanship has grown over time — especially among Republicans.
All else equal, the relative importance of partisanship for the increasing (un)willingness of Republicans to stay-at-home highlights the challenge that politics poses for public health.‘

Conclusion:

Our results point to an unequivocal conclusion: partisanship is a far more important determinant of an individual’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic than the impact of COVID-19 in that individual’s local community.
The implications of this are significant.
The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is currently as much a political problem as it is a public health problem.
Given the differences in perceptions and behavior we document between Democrats and Republicans exposed to the same level of COVID-19 in their local communities, simply highlighting the public health concerns associated with COVID-19 seems unlikely to encourage the collective decline in social mobility that is required to help mitigate the further spread of the pandemic.
Instead, political leadership — especially by Republicans — seems essential for changing the partisan-related differences we document in individuals’ behaviors and opinion.

In an alive worse-case scenario with the COVID-19 vaccine, the T-Rump’s roll-out plan concludes at the end of January, which might/could complicate an already compicated, intricate vaccination program nationwide (TPM): ‘That’s a very tall order — especially given that the Trump administration appears to have only completed planning for phase 1a, the initial 17.6 million, a category of people set to be vaccinated by around the time that Biden takes office.‘

T-Rump is a monster, absolutely. And his GOP takes blame for all the suffering and death caused by their hostile, belligerent bullshit…

T-Rump and his malignant GOP…

(Illustration: M.C Escher’s ‘Scholastica,’ found here).