Full disclosure: GOP voters likelier than Dems to report side effects from COVID vaccines – Washington Times

Republican voters are more likely than Democrats to report side effects after receiving COVID-19 vaccinations, a study has found.

Public health researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published the findings Friday in JAMA Network Open. They compared state-level percentages of Republican votes in the 2020 presidential election to 620,456 reports of side effects after COVID-19 jabs, recorded in the Department of Health and Human Services Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System from 2020 to 2022.

The studyfound that a 10% increase in a states Republican voting numbers was associated with a 5% increase in the odds of a patient or doctor reporting vaccine side effects, a 25% increase in the odds of reporting a severe symptom and a 21% increase in the odds that anything reported would be severe.

According to the researchers, the study is the first to examine the link between voting patterns and reported side effects. They pointed to earlier data showing that counties that voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 had lower COVID-19 vaccination rates and higher COVID-19 mortality rates.

These results suggest that either the perception of vaccine [side effects] or the motivation to report them was associated with political inclination, the researchers wrote.

For comparison, the study also analyzed 12,620 reports of adverse effects after flu vaccines recorded in the VAERS database between 2019 and 2022. It found that voting Republican in the 2020 presidential race made no difference to the odds of reporting side effects from a flu shot.

Reached for comment, some medical experts not connected with the study said it confirmed the influence of dueling political narratives about vaccination during the pandemic.

As there is no physiological plausibility to vaccine side effects tracking with political ideology, the study is an example of how the value of the vaccine, for some individuals, is not based on its biological characteristics but on what value the majority of the tribe they belong to assigns it, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Katy Talento, an epidemiologist who served as Mr. Trumps top health adviser at the White House Domestic Policy Council before the pandemic, noted that Biden administration policies forced many Trump voters to get COVID-19 shots to keep their jobs despite valid concerns about a lack of long-term research supporting them.

You dont see the same mass tyranny, coercion and public shaming of Trump voters around flu vaccines, Ms. Talento said. When youre getting a COVID vaccine you dont want to get, youre going to be more hyper-vigilant about its effects.

The authors of Fridays study said their findings were consistent with either an over-reporting of side effects among Democrats or an underreporting among Republicans. They noted the limitation of focusing only on state-level voting percentages.

Nevertheless, the only way the results might not support a relatively increased [adverse effect] reporting rate among individual Republican-voting citizens is if Republican-voting citizens were less likely to report but far more likely than Democrat-voting citizens to be vaccinated in the first place or if, as the proportion of Republican-voting citizens in a state increased, the reporting rates among the progressively fewer Democrat-voting citizens increased at an even steeper rate, the researchers wrote. Neither possibility seems likely.

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.

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Full disclosure: GOP voters likelier than Dems to report side effects from COVID vaccines - Washington Times