Many countries had partisan divides on Covid vaccination, but they were more lethal in the US than anywhere else.

It would be easy to dismiss this trend as merely exasperating -- an obstacle to progress on climate change and a source of irritation at extended family gatherings -- but over the past 18 months, the politicisation of attitudes to science may have directly cost as many as 60,000 American lives.

This is the stark implication of a new study from the Yale school of public health, which found that since Covid vaccines became widely available in the US, the mortality rate of registered Republicans in Ohio and Florida climbed by 33 per cent during America's winter Covid wave last year, compared with just a 10 per cent rise among Democrats.

Mortality trends for the two groups had tracked one another closely before the pandemic, and both spiked together in 2020, but when science presented the world with a protective shield, Republicans were loath to accept it.

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