"In one extreme case, the right-wing media bubble may even have been lethal for its inhabitants. That was the 2009-10 swine flu epidemic, which eventually killed up to 18,000 Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "When the flu first emerged, Republicans and Democrats responded with the same level of concern. That makes sense. Why should political differences affect our judgments about health? But then conservative commentators began to denounce the Obama administration’s call for people to get vaccinated. Glenn Beck said he would do “the exact opposite” of what the federal government recommended. Rush Limbaugh said: If “you have some idiot government official demanding, telling me I must take this vaccine, I’ll never take it.” Some on the left also voiced suspicion of the vaccine, but it was more common on right-wing shows to hear that flu vaccinations were a nefarious Obama plot. The upshot was that Democrats were 50 percent more likely to say that they would get the life-saving vaccinations, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. Matthew A. Baum, the Harvard scholar who wrote the journal article, told me that he couldn’t calculate how many of the total flu deaths were attributable to conservatives putting too much faith in their pundits. Something similar may have happened when conservatives like Michele Bachmann denounced the HPV vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer (Bachmann suggested that the vaccine could be “very dangerous”). Only 35 percent of girls have received the full course of HPV vaccinations, with particularly low rates in more conservative states like Arkansas, Mississippi, Utah and Kansas. That can’t be good for women in those states. "
Posted on: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 03:52:01 +0000