Morning folks, time for my first Mastodon thread (!)
Ahead of the #midterms tomorrow, I want to talk about the tragic politicisation of science in the US.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the Republicans became the anti-science party, but the process probably began in the 1980s, when the Christian right first emerged as a major force in conservative American politics.
Since then, the journey has been smooth and swift, and there is now a stunning partisan divide on confidence in science 😥
It would be easy to dismiss this trend as merely exasperating — a source of irritation at family gatherings — but over the past 18 months, this partisan divide may have cost as many as 60,000 American lives
This is the stark implication of a study by @paulgp and others, which found that since Covid vaccines became widely available, the mortality rate of registered Republicans in Ohio and Florida climbed by 33% during America’s winter Covid wave last year, compared with just 10% among Democrats
John Burn-Murdoch 
Lynn