MAGA Will Kill Many Americans

Greed, willful ignorance and mortality

Source: ACA Signups

Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration broke with previous policy and approved the sale of blueberry and mango-flavored vapes, dismissing long-standing concerns that making sweet-flavored vapes available will lead to increased smoking, especially among young people. A White House spokesman claimed that this policy U-turn reflected “Gold Standard Science,” but the decision came after Donald Trump — who suddenly became pro-vaping in 2024 after meeting with a “leading vaping lobbyist” — personally put pressure on the FDA commissioner. Trump is reportedly hoping that support for vaping will win back support from young men.

In other news, the New York Times reports that the Trump FDA has been suppressing research that refutes disinformation from anti-vaccine activists:

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration have blocked publication of several studies supporting the safety of widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles in recent months, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed.

The studies, which cost millions of dollars in public funds, were conducted by scientists at the agency, who worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records. They found serious side effects to be very rare.

Does MAGA want to see thousands of Americans die prematurely from smoking and refusal to get vaccinated? Yes.

Let’s back up for a minute. Most Americans appear to be unaware of the fact that life expectancy in the United States is substantially lower than in other advanced countries; we’re on a par with poorer nations in Europe like Albania. Surely even fewer people know that this wasn’t always true. In the early 1980s Americans lived about as long as citizens of other rich nations. Now we die substantially earlier:

What changed in the 1980s? The obvious answer is politics: The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 heralded a sharp U.S. turn to the right. And there is a strong correlation between right-wing politics and increased mortality — stronger than many of the statistical associations that guide public health policy.

You can see this correlation at the state level. Here’s life expectancy by state plotted against Trump’s share of the 2024 vote:

I’ve labeled the 10 most populous states. I’ve also labeled the outliers — red states with relatively high life expectancy, blue states with low life expectancy — to emphasize that these are small states. Taking population sizes into account, the trend line through the data points shows that there is there’s a strong, clear negative correlation between Trump-leaning orientation and low life expectancy at the state level. Deep red states like Alabama and West Virginia have life expectancy comparable to, say, Kazakhstan.

What drives this correlation? Part of the answer is that red states have weak social safety nets and are especially unwilling to provide healthcare to vulnerable populations. As I noted in my most recent primer, many red states refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would have borne the bulk of the cost. Texas, which likes to boast about its economic success, leads the nation in the share of its children who lack health insurance.

Beyond this, right-wing politics in America often goes hand in hand with hostility to science in general and medical science in particular. The deadly linkage between reactionary politics and rejection of science was obvious during the Covid pandemic. The chart at the top of this post comes from the redoubtable Charles Gaba, who carefully tracked the association at the county level between political orientation and vaccination, and — because the vaccines worked when people were willing to get them — between politics and death rates. Deaths per capita in America’s reddest counties were almost three times as high as in our bluest counties. Also notice, in the chart comparing America with France, the big drop in US life expectancy during Covid, which had a lot to do with vaccine rejection.

Why is right-wing politics so deadly? Greed and willful ignorance.

The right’s opposition to providing healthcare obviously has a lot to do with greed, with wealthy donors unwilling to pay taxes to help others in need.

Greed is also an important factor in the attack on medical science. The best-known example of scientific disinformation promoted by corporate interests is the fossil-fuel-financed attack on climate science, but the template for this attack was the earlier campaign by the tobacco industry’s “merchants of doubt” to discredit evidence that smoking is harmful to your health. The straight line from this campaign to the relaxation of rules on flavored vapes is obvious.

The role of greed in the anti-vaccine movement may be less obvious, but the fact is that quack medicine is big business. Right-wing radio and social media have long relied on peddlers of snake oil for a large part of their revenue. So much of the attack on medical science can be seen as financially motivated.

Which is not to discount the role of willful ignorance driven by ideology. The modern U.S. right is, to a large extent, an alliance between oligarchs and white Christian nationalists — and the latter are deeply hostile to Enlightenment values, modern science very much included.

Now that this alliance is in power, we’re seeing the forces that keep U.S. life expectancy far below that in other rich countries, that cause Texans to die younger than residents of Massachusetts, go into overdrive at a national level.

The consequences will be grim.

We’re already seeing a resurgence of measles as a result of lower vaccination rates. Other infectious diseases will follow. And when — not if — we face another pandemic, there’s every reason to fear the worst.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans are set to lose health insurance this year, and millions more as drastic Medicaid cuts kick in. Reproducing a chart from my last primer:

America, then, is on track to experience a large rise in unnecessary deaths. But at least we’ll have mango-flavored vapes.

MUSICAL CODA