Although Republicans/MAGA hatters/Q-balls hate vaccine and mask mandates, the COVID-19 virus loves them — yesterday Texas nit-twit Gov. Greg Abbott idiotized an executive order barring private companies or any other entity from requiring vaccines, this in a state where 67,000 people have already died, with most-likely many more to come.
It’s been noted before that the COVID-handle rate of Blue states vs Red has never worked out well for wing-nutters.
They’re dying for politics.

And now another new study showing the same obvious thing — vaccines/masks work:

COVID spread was 8% lower in states with Democratic governors because of stricter restrictions, according to a new study in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. https://t.co/alpx5NfSbj

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 12, 2021

Nutshell via Forbes yesterday afternoon:

States with Democratic governors had a lower spread of Covid-19 than Republican-led ones because of stricter public health measures, a new study in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found, which researchers said underscores how much Covid-19 restrictions have been “politicized” — and why health professionals should be the ones calling the shots.
…
Democratic-led states had a PPI (Public Health Protective Policy Index) that was approximately 10 points higher on average than states with GOP governors, though the study notes some Republican-led states like Maryland, Vermont and Massachusetts had stricter measures that were closer to the Democratic states.

The 10-point difference in PPI was linked to an 8-percent “increase in the expected number of new cases,” meaning the spread of Covid-19 was that much lower in Democratic-led states than Republican ones on average because they had more stringent measures in place.
…
“The main lesson of this research is that better public health requires a less partisan approach to the making of public health policies,” study co-author Olga Shvetsova, a political science professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York, said in a statement

Key context:

The Vanderbilt analysis is the latest in a string of studies to show that face masks play a key role in reducing Covid-19 transmission or reducing the severity of the disease, and health experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci have advocated for a national mask mandate as cases continue to rise across the country.
Mask wearing has become a source of partisan controversy, however, exacerbated by President Donald Trump and his allies’ refusal to wear masks or impose mask-wearing restrictions.
North Dakota and South Dakota, the two states currently experiencing the worst Covid-19 cases per capita in the country, are both led by Republican governors who have refused to implement mask mandates even as cases have soared. “Those who don’t want to wear a mask shouldn’t be shamed into wearing one,” South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wrote in an op-ed for the Rapid City Journal last week, citing sources that “question the effectiveness of masks.”
White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said North Dakota had “the least use of masks that we have seen in retail establishments of any place we have been” in a visit to Bismarck Monday, calling the lack of mask-wearing “deeply unfortunate.”

Birx said who? She must feel like shit nowadays after T-Rump’s murderous pandemic response last year and her still standing there.
Ending the infectious spread of COVID can be helped by deliberate action (ArsTechnica this afternoon):

A Wisconsin brewery that says it’s fed up with “anti-science,” “Tucker Carlson-watching zombies” is funding a series of lawsuits against school boards that do not follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines on COVID-19.
So far, the Minocqua Brewing Company’s Super PAC has helped parents sue two school districts and says it plans on “suing every school board in Wisconsin that doesn’t follow CDC guidelines to protect the spread of COVID in schools.”

In a Facebook post Sunday, brewery owner and Super PAC founder Kirk Bangstad answered a question that he said he was asked in “every interview” he did with news outlets last week: “Why is a brewery funding this lawsuit?”

“Our Super PAC should NOT be funding these lawsuits,” Bangstad wrote.
“We always thought that our government, the teacher’s union, the ACLU, the hospitals, the nurse’s unions, or any other number of progressive groups or ‘academies of smart people who understand stuff’ should be stepping up to block the alt-right, anti-science, and anti-history nonsense that has overcome school boards across our state. Wisconsin communities have exploded with the Delta variant because many school districts have dropped all forms of COVID mitigation that were in place last year due to the shrieking hordes of Tucker Carlson-watching zombies separated from their cerebrums and driven only by their lizard brains.”
…
Bangstad wrote that there is one high school “where we’ve heard that anyone daring to protect kids and staff from COVID are being railroaded by folks who still have delusions that Trump won the election and who recently got their YouTube epidemiology degrees in ‘how masks cause carbon dioxide poisoning.'”

Whoa! It’s both right-on and deeply sad at the same time.

And once again, here we are…

(Illustration out front: Edvard Munch‘s ‘The Scream,’ lithograph version, found here).