China: The Hundred-Year Plan for World Dominance

 As this note is being written, the end of the first year of war in Ukraine is upon us.  It seems clear that Putin will continue the fight for as long as he can.  Ukraine, the US, and NATO seem determined to continue on as well.  The great unknown at this point is the role that China may choose to play.  Russia is already trying to gain weapons support from Iran and North Korea.  Will China, still claiming an unbounded friendship with Russia, join in with material support for Russia’s war machine?  It is already aiding Russia by buying its energy products (at a discount), and presumably also providing access to sanctioned products it needs.  Other countries are doing the same thing, but providing weapons to counter those Ukraine is receiving takes these alliances to a quite different level.  At its simplest, we have the European Union, NATO, the G7, and the United States waging war against Russia and its allies.  We also have Russia claiming to be waging war against the West with help from its allies.  In effect, we have the collection of mostly democratic Western nations battling the autocrats of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.  Except for the current limitation of the battlefield to the plains of poor Ukraine, this situation looks like a prelude to a possible world war.

The nature of China’s ultimate participation is critical.  It has made it clear that it desires to replace the US as the dominant political and economic power.  It may also desire military dominance.  Biden likes to talk of China and the US as being competitors, but is it more accurate to say they are enemies?  Michael Pillsbury provides a compelling perspective in his book The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.  Pillsbury worked in government service through several presidential administrations and interacted with Chinese officials frequently over the years.  He claims the US, and he himself, totally misunderstood the Chinese and their goals for much of his service.  Assisted by the acquired ability to read Chinese writings in their original language, he eventually discovered he had been fooled, along with everyone else.  What he uncovered was a long-term plan to become the world’s dominant power.  That was the role China thought was its destiny.  And in so doing this, it would also gain revenge for a century of humiliations at the hands of the US and other world powers.  A critical element of that plan was to convince the US to help China gain the necessary technology to eventually dominate the US.  Pillsbury details how we were so easily deceived.

“Over time, I discovered proposals by Chinese hawks (ying pai) to the Chinese leadership to mislead and manipulate American policymakers to obtain intelligence and military, technological, and economic assistance.  I learned that these hawks had been advising Chinese leaders, beginning with Mao Zedong, to avenge a century of humiliation and aspired to replace the United States as the economic, military, and political leader of the world by the year 2049 (the one hundredth anniversary of the Communist Revolution).  This plan became known as ‘the Hundred-Year Marathon.’  It is a plan that has been implemented by the Communist Party leadership from the beginning of its relationship with the United States.”

Pillsbury tells us that China, with its long and unique history, developed a culture incorporating features that were foreign to Western nations.  In particular, deception was of the greatest value in pursuit of success against an opponent.  Scholars tried to tell policymakers this, but they chose to not listen.

“In the 1940s, an effort was funded by the U.S. government to understand the Chinese mind-set…The researchers, who included the scholars Nathan Leites, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, also analyzed the themes of popular Chinese books and films.  One conclusion that emerged was that Chinese did not view strategy in the same way Americans did.  Wherein Americans tended to favor direct action, those of Chinese ethnic origin were found to favor the indirect over the direct, ambiguity and deception over clarity and transparency.  Another conclusion was that Chinese literature and writings on strategy prized deception.”

Nathan Leites delivered this observation.

“Chinese deception is oriented mainly toward inducing the enemy to act inexpediently and less toward protecting the integrity of one’s own plans.  In other cultures, particularly Western, deception is used primarily with the intention of insuring one’s own forces can realize their maximum striking potential…the prevalent payoff of deception for the Chinese is that one does not have to use one’s own forces…”

It was more comfortable for policymakers to assume that other people desired to be just like us than to assume a fundamental difference between us and a significant national group.

“The results of the original 1940s study—that an ethnonational group viewed the world differently—proved controversial and politically incorrect, and they were never published.  The sole existing copy rests quietly in the Library of Congress.  It would not be until 2000 that I learned from Chinese generals that the study’s conclusions were essentially correct.”

China’s first target would be communist Russia, offering it assistance in countering its enemies.  But Russia soon learned that China’s offer was intended not to benefit Russia, but to benefit China.  When that strategy no longer worked, China targeted the US.

“The Chinese planned to use the Americans as they had used the Soviets—as tools for their own advancement, all the while pledging cooperation against a third rival power.  This is how the Marathon was conducted throughout most of the Cold War—China using the Soviet Union’s rivalry with America to extract Soviet aid and then, when that faltered, shifting to the Americans by offering to help against the Soviets.  In doing so, the Chinese were reflecting another ancient stratagem—‘kill with a borrowed sword,’ or, in other words, attack using the strength of another.”

It is usually proclaimed that Richard Nixon showed great courage and insight in his “going to China.”  However, it was China, Chinese military leaders, who came to the US and set the political developments in motion.

“But many have forgotten—if they ever even knew—that the opening was not exactly initiated by Nixon or by Kissinger.  During their first months in office, their focus was on improving relations with the Soviet Union.  They had no desire to provoke the Soviets’ ire by dallying with China.  Indeed, in many ways, it was not Nixon who went to China, but China that went to Nixon.”

“Modern China’s first foreign minister was a general.  We now know, from Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, that the decision to pursue an opening with the United States came not from China’s civilian leaders, but instead from a committee of four Chinese generals.”

The Chinese convinced US political leaders that it was mainly interested in furthering its own economic progress.  This deception worked wonderfully for them.  Several presidents bought this pitch, and greatly aided China, both economically and militarily, perhaps none more than Ronald Reagan.

“National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 11 signed by President Reagan in 1981, permitted the Pentagon to sell advanced air, ground, naval, and missile technology to the Chinese to transform the People’s Liberation Army into a world-class fighting force.  The following year, Reagan’s NSDD 12 inaugurated nuclear cooperation and development between the United States and China, to expand China’s military and civilian nuclear programs.”

“Additionally, the Reagan administration provided funding and training to newly established Chinese government-run institutes specializing in genetic engineering, automation, biotechnology, lasers, space technology, manned spaceflight, intelligent robotics, and more.  Reagan eventually approved a Chinese military delegation visit to one of the crown jewels of national security, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA]…”

“The Reagan administration hoped it was countering Soviet power by giving a boost to the Chinese, and everyone—from Reagan on down—wanted to believe Beijing’s claims that China was moving toward greater liberalization.”

Even the best deceptions cannot go on forever.  Spokespersons will eventually tip their hands, politicians will brag, and everyone will wish that progress will come more quickly.  China’s ambitions can be found by those who listen and pay attention to what is written for Chinese consumption.

“…they see a multipolar world as merely a strategic waypoint en route to a new global hierarchy in which China is alone at the top.  The Chinese term for this new order is da tong, often mistranslated by Western scholars as ‘commonwealth,’ or ‘an era of harmony.’  However, da tong is better translated as ‘an era of unipolar dominance.’  Since 2005, Chinese leaders have spoken at the United Nations and other public forums of their supposed vision of this kind of harmonious world.”

The Chinese cannot anticipate this eventuality without discussing what such “harmony” would mean to those subjected to this Chinese dominance.  Pillsbury refers to the work of one author that presented a glimpse at what China seems to have in mind.

“For example, Zhao Tingyang’s The Under-Heaven System: The Philosophy of World Institution was published in 2005 and is gaining increasing currency in mainline Chinese thought today.  Zhao’s ‘system’ redesigns global structures based on traditional Chinese ideals.  That new world is called tianxia, which in Mandarin can be translated as ‘under-heaven,’ ‘empire,’ and ‘China.’  The China scholar William A. Callahan translates tianxia as a unified global system with China’s ‘superior’ civilization at the top.  Other civilizations, such as the United States, are part of the ‘barbarian wilderness.’  As the center of the civilized world, China would have the responsibility to ‘improve’ all the nations and peoples of the world by ‘harmonizing’ them—spreading Chinese values, language, and culture so they can better fit into under-heaven.  This empire ‘values order over freedom, ethics over law, and elite governance over democracy and human rights’.”

This author made it clear to Pillsbury that to sustain such a system, China would have to possess overwhelming military might such that there could be no possibility of contesting China’s mandates.

This description of China might seem to some like a plot to a low-budget, class B movie.  However, there are many instances where China’s actions seem consistent with this picture.  For example, the radical measures China is taking to eliminate Uyghur culture appear consistent with “harmonizing them—spreading Chinese values, language, and culture so they can better fit into under-heaven.”

Getting back to the issues arising from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, how might China proceed?  It clearly wishes to dominate the US and the Western nations of Europe but is not near that state now.  However, if Russia could dominate Europe militarily it would diminish the US relative to China without it having to make much of an investment.  That may have seemed a possibility before the invasion, but it now seems a bit ridiculous.  Given China’s desired path to dominance seems to be to trick adversaries into doing stupid things, backing off to the slow Marathon pace seems more characteristic of past behaviors.  On the other hand, the nations that have sworn to defend Ukraine from Russia, have also sworn to prevent China from becoming a world domineering economic force.  Perhaps the Chinese leaders now believe that the Marathon plan has been revealed and must be replaced with something more urgent and risky.

Stay Tuned…

 

Deglobalization: Biden is Making America Great Again

 There is no sturdier defender of the international economic order that has been in effect for many decades than The Economist.  It salutes free trade and free markets at every opportunity.  In recent issues it has been bemoaning the erosion of that system as a combination of the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the rise of an aggressive and arrogant China has forced countries to rethink their dependence on international sources of critical goods.  Although the United States is not the only country reconsidering its policies, in The destructive new logic that threatens globalization, it is accused of dealing the system its fatal blow.  It begins with this lede.

“America is leading a dangerous global slide towards subsidies, export controls and protectionism.”

“Since 1945 the world economy has run according to a system of rules and norms underwritten by America. This brought about unprecedented economic integration that boosted growth, lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and helped the West prevail over Soviet Russia in the cold war. Today the system is in peril. Countries are racing to subsidise green industry, lure manufacturing away from friend and foe alike and restrict the flow of goods and capital. Mutual benefit is out and national gain is in. An era of zero-sum thinking has begun.”

“The old system was already under strain, as America’s interest in maintaining it waned after the global financial crisis of 2007-09. But President Joe Biden’s abandonment of free-market rules for an aggressive industrial policy has dealt it a fresh blow. America has unleashed vast subsidies, amounting to $465bn, for green energy, electric cars and semiconductors. These are laced with requirements that production should be local. Bureaucrats tasked with scrutinising inward investments to prevent undue foreign influence over the economy now themselves hold sway over sectors making up 60% of the stockmarket. And officials are banning the flow of ever more exports—notably of high-end chips and chipmaking equipment to China.”

The article claims that countries like the United States are essentially reindustrializing themselves.  In the process they must duplicate the research and development of their former trading partners, something it considers an expensive waste of time and resources.  In particular, it suggests the global response to climate change will be hindered by this transition.  Another serious concern is raised.

“Another problem is the fury of friends and potential allies. America’s genius after the second world war was to realise that its interests lay in supporting openness in global commerce. As a result it pursued globalisation despite, by 1960, making up nearly 40% of global dollar GDP.”

“Today its share of output has fallen to 25% and America needs friends more than ever. Its ban on exports to China’s chipmakers will work only if the Dutch firm ASML and Japan’s Tokyo Electron also refuse to supply them with equipment. Battery supply chains will likewise be more secure if the democratic world operates as one bloc. Yet America’s protectionism is irking allies in Europe and Asia.”

Let us begin with this last point.  Yes, allies are “irked” by Biden’s protectionist measures.  However, at the same time they are proclaiming that NATO, the European Union, and the G7 have never been so collaborative as they are now in supporting Ukraine’s efforts to survive an invasion by Russia.  What is obvious from this collaboration is that without the US, NATO would be completely ineffective in coming to Ukraine’s aid.  It also follows that NATO countries would likely be easy taking for a successful and resurgent Russian Army without US participation.  These “irked” countries should also recognize that what is happening in Ukraine could be the harbinger for a World War III in the same way the Spanish Civil War previewed World War II.  Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have formed an alliance of sorts, and are collaborating militarily and economically, a counterforce of autocracies whose members all hate the democracies with which they are contending.  It is necessary for the US to be as powerful and proficient as possible to contend with these enemies.

The same group of “irked” allies are also collaborating with the US in measures to hinder China from reaching its goal of political and economic dominance.  The US must take the lead.  What is the alternative?

There are three international crisis requiring action: Russia, China, and climate change.  The US is now, once again, the leader of the free world.  One might say Biden is “making America great again.” 

Is deglobalization bringing to an end a period of great economic and social progress?  Not hardly.  The distribution of resources from wealthy countries to non-wealthy countries in search of low wages and higher profits did do some good in lifting economies around the world and eliminating poverty in many places, but it did that while creating social unrest over increased economic inequality in the wealthy countries driving globalization. 

The impact of globalization on the distribution of income has never been more clearly demonstrated than by a graph produced by Branko Milanovic in his book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization.  This has received some notoriety as “the elephant curve.”

This chart plots the percentage gain in real income (2005 international dollars) over the period 1988 to 2008.  The horizontal axis is the percentile of the global income distribution.  One can conclude that the incomes of low to moderate income people across the world have increased over this period by what appears to be a significant amount.  There is a dip in income growth to approximately zero at 80%, followed by a steep rise at higher income levels. Globalization has helped the low-income people of the world and it has benefited the wealthy of the world.  Who are those left behind as indicated by Milanovic’s point B?

“They are almost all from the rich economies of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).  If we disregard those among them who are from the relatively recent OECD members (several Eastern European countries, Chili, and Mexico), about three-quarters of the people in this group are citizens of the ‘old-rich’ countries of Western Europe, North America, Oceania….and Japan….People at point B generally belong to the lower halves of their countries’ income distributions.”

“In short: the great winners have been the Asian poor and middle classes; the great losers, the lower middle classes of the rich world.”

No economic system that punishes middle-class citizens in order to increase the wealth of the wealthiest can long survive.  Milanovic’s “old-rich” countries, including the US, are all suffering unrest as angry citizens drift towards anti-democratic leaders and ideologies.  Democracy itself is at stake.  The best way to ensure a democratic system is to have a majority of voters believing that their government is providing a path forward to a better life.  National economic inequality must be constrained.  The middle class must do better.  Deglobalization and the creation of more higher paying domestic jobs is a good start.

The Avian Flu Is on the Move: Beware

In his 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, David Quammen warned us that a pandemic was inevitable.  He based this on the rapidity with which dangerous new zoonoses were appearing.  That term refers to a disease being transferred from an animal to a human.  He described humans as an “outbreak,” a species whose population exceeds a level where its viability can be assured.  In the animal world, such outbreaks eventually end either from a lack of resources or the propagation of a disease that greatly scales back the population.  To support the notion that a dangerous virus lies in our future he constructed a list of recent viral appearances.

“If you assembled a short list of the highlights and high anxieties of that saga within recent decades, it could include....Machupo [1959]....Marburg (1967), Lassa (1969), Ebola (1976)....HIV-1 (inferred in 1981, first isolated in 1983), HIV-2 (1986), Sin Nombre (1993), Hendra (1994), avian flu (1997), Nipah (1998), West Nile (1999), SARS (2003), and the much feared but anticlimactic swine flu of 2009.” 

Timing forced him to miss MERS (2012) which was identified in the year of his publication, and there could be some I haven’t heard about.  And now we have another deadly coronavirus, COVID-19 (2019).  All of these can kill infected humans, but in most cases the transmission to humans was too limited, as of yet, to create a pandemic.  SARS and COVID-19 were the exceptions.  We were lucky with SARS, but not so lucky with its successor.  Fortunately, the mortality rate for COVID-19 was low compared to some of the viruses in this list.  Quammen and epidemiologists in the 2012 period were focused on avian/bird flu as the great threat to human existence.  It existed mostly in domesticated bird species and would only rarely be contracted by a human, usually someone in constant contact with the animals.  However, when contracted, death was a common outcome.  The fear was that this flu virus might mutate into a version that could infect humans more readily and then be transmitted between individuals.  This virus, H5N1, does its damage via eye infections, pneumonia, including viral pneumonia, acute respiratory distress, and inflammation of the brain and heart. 

Recent events suggest that the virus is mutating and perhaps moving in our direction.  This source indicates the rate of infections within domesticated animals has tripled over the record rate of last year.  Quammen returned recently with notice that avian flue was now spreading to non-avian wild species and might be showing greater ease at infecting humans in A Dolphin, a Porpoise and Two Men Got Bird Flu. That’s a Warning to the Rest of Us.  And then there was the recent article: An Even Deadlier Pandemic Could Soon Be Here by Zeynep Tufekci.  She provides this information.

“Bird flu — known more formally as avian influenza — has long hovered on the horizons of scientists’ fears. This pathogen, especially the H5N1 strain, hasn’t often infected humans, but when it has, 56 percent of those known to have contracted it have died. Its inability to spread easily, if at all, from one person to another has kept it from causing a pandemic.”

“But things are changing. The virus, which has long caused outbreaks among poultry, is infecting more and more migratory birds, allowing it to spread more widely, even to various mammals, raising the risk that a new variant could spread to and among people.”

“Alarmingly, it was recently reported that a mutant H5N1 strain was not only infecting minks at a fur farm in Spain but also most likely spreading among them, unprecedented among mammals. Even worse, the mink’s upper respiratory tract is exceptionally well suited to act as a conduit to humans, Thomas Peacock, a virologist who has studied avian influenza, told me.”

The question we face is how to respond to this information.  There are entities in place that attempt to track the emergence of epidemics and could indicate the existence of a new viral threat, but that mission depends on the ability to detect and pass on the causes of infections.  And it depends on our society being aware of and concerned about the possible threat.

“…quick testing should be widely available and easy to obtain globally, especially for poultry workers and people handling wild birds or other wildlife. And current testing capabilities should be quickly expanded. There are 91 public health labs in the United States that can test for H5 influenza. Positive results are sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where further analyses can detect H5N1 within about 48 hours. But plans should be in place to increase the amount of tests and testing facilities in case demand ramps up.”

Vaccines have been developed for this type of flu, but how fast could they be produced in order to contain an outbreak?

“Perhaps the best news is that we have several H5N1 vaccines already approved by the Food and Drug Administration whose safety and immune response have been studied.”

“The U.S. government has a small H5N1 vaccine stockpile, but it would be nowhere near enough if a serious outbreak occurred. The current plan is to mass-produce them if and when such an outbreak occurs, based on the particular variant involved.”

“There are several problems, though, with this approach even under the best-case scenarios. Producing hundreds of millions of doses of a new vaccine could take six months or more.”

Existing vaccines use the now old-fashioned method of creating doses from an egg, a slow process.  The mRNA-based techniques could be funded to prepare vaccines that would be produced faster, but is there the will to do that?

“The mRNA-based platforms used to make two of the Covid vaccines also don’t depend on eggs. Scott Hensley, an influenza expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that those vaccines can be mass-produced faster, in as little as three months. There are currently no approved mRNA vaccines for influenza, but efforts to make one should be expedited.”

Even if all resources are put in play, it would take a very long time to vaccinate the world, as the coronavirus experience has shown.  A lot of people can die in a matter of months.  The US would have the resources to prepare to protect itself from such a future outbreak, but should it.  Tufekci certainly thinks we should.

“This time, we have not just the warning, but also many of the tools we need to fend a pandemic off. We should not wait until it’s too late.”

She may be right, but in demanding politically risky behavior from those in power she should realize that the nation was once before in this exact position.  Leaders at that time chose to follow her advice and it did not end well for anyone.  Michael Lewis recounts the tale in his book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story.

“That story began in 1976.  In March of that year, at the end of the flu season, a handful of soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey became ill.  One died.  The CDC gathered samples and found they’d been infected by a new strain of swine flu that appeared to be related to the virus that caused the 1918 pandemic.  The army found that at least five hundred more soldiers had been infected.”

The CDC experts had some experience to fall back on to influence them, plus a vivid knowledge of the havoc caused by the 1918 outbreak.

“They’d detected a pattern: roughly every decade the flu genome found some way to evade the human immune system.  They had predicted the previous genetic shift in the virus, back in 1968, and were expecting the next one soon, and believed it would involve pigs.  The sample size was small—1918, 1957, 1968—but each time a new strain of flu had been identified, it had resulted in a pandemic.  The severity of the disease was an open question, but it felt to the experts a lot like the one back in 1918—when the first outbreaks had also been mild.”

The head of the CDC recommended that the nation prepare to vaccinate its entire population before the next flu season.  Political leaders agreed to follow the CDC’s advice.

“Then just about everything that could go wrong went wrong.  The vaccination program began on October 1, 1976, continued for two and a half months, and reached forty-three million Americans.”

“Two weeks into the program, three elderly people in Pittsburg died.  They’d all been vaccinated at the same clinic.  Their deaths made national television news.  The vaccine fell under new suspicion…A month later a recently vaccinated man in Minnesota was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome.  Over the next few weeks more cases emerged, until the CDC had counted fifty-four in ten states.  The vaccine was pretty clearly responsible…The vaccine program went from controversial to unpopular to, on December 16, suspended.”

“And the pandemic never came.  The new strain of swine flu simply vanished.  No one knew why.”

According to Lewis’s telling, after this incident, the CDC never recovered the influence and respect, nor the confidence, it once had. 

We must be ready to move quickly when necessary, but it is difficult to see a preemptive strategy emerging from our current political environment.

  

Politics and Medical Science; Politics and Deaths

 A recent article in The Economist discusses the manner in which political polarization has spread to the treatment of medical science and medical scientists.  It was titled “Red and blue science” in the paper issue, but has changed to America’s culture wars extend into medicine for the online version.  The party issues have been greatly influenced by the Covid pandemic and the contentious responses of scientific experts and politicians.  The article focuses on the activities in Florida where the governor, Ron DeSantis, has made deriding medical experts a political ploy.  What is of interest here is the data presented on the confidence US citizens have in their medical hierarchy that compares Republicans and Democrats.  Data on the flu vaccination rates for members of the two parties are also presented.

Consider the confidence data.

 Except for a burst of excess confidence by Republicans in the 1980s, the attitudes of the parties have been reasonably consistent in drifting downward over several decades.  With the coming of the pandemic, the confidence expressed appears to have a distinct political component with Democrats seemingly plateaued or perhaps gaining confidence.  Meanwhile, the confidence of Republicans continues to fall.

The point to make from this data is not that one side understands the issues better than the other; the point is that a politicized lack of confidence in medical experts has consequences.  Consider the data on flu vaccination rates by party.

Democratic vaccinations are slowly increasing while the Republican vaccination rate is following the politics and drifting downward.

The article ends with this conclusion.

“All this has real consequences. Republican voters are less likely to get a covid-19 booster. They have also become more hesitant about other vaccines, including flu shots…An outbreak of measles in Ohio in November and December seemed entirely caused by unvaccinated children. ‘We haven’t had politicised epidemics before,’ says Robert Blendon, at Harvard University. ‘There were never Republican views of polio, or H1N1 or smallpox, and Democrat views’.”

Political views on medical science can have medical consequences.  There are people out there trying to tally what those consequences might be.  Consider Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the Covid-19 Pandemic.  This document was produced by Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason L. Schwartz for the National Bureau of Economic Research.  They have provided interesting conclusions.

“Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19, amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democrat- leaning counties and evidence of a link between political party affiliation and vaccination views. This study constructs an individual-level dataset with political affiliation and excess death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic via a linkage of 2017 voter registration in Ohio and Florida to mortality data from 2018 to 2021.”

Concern that all deaths attributable to Covid are not recorded as such leads medical experts to lean towards excess total death increases relative to a pre-pandemic time period as a more accurate Covid death tally.

“We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Post- vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.”

 We are a country where the political parties are nearly evenly divided.  Each national election has results where individual campaigns are decided by a handful of votes.  Presidential campaigns are decided by thousands of votes in states where millions have voted.  Yet the Republicans are pursuing a strategy that impugns medical experts and denies any notion that vaccines should be necessary.  In so doing, they are losing voters via unnecessarily higher death rates relative to those of Democratic voters.

So, the Republicans have yet another demographic problem, one of their own making.