Paul Krugman wrote a must-read piece for his substack site titled Maga Will Kill Many Americans. He begins with some of the nonsense currently coming out of the DHS Department as run by RFK the Lesser. But he goes on to document that there is a very clear correlation between right-wing politics and lower life expectancy. People die a lot sooner in Red states than Blue ones. And I believe I previously mentioned that during the latter days of the Covid pandemic the hospitalization and death rates were significantly higher in counties that voted for Trump in 2020 than in counties that voted for Biden. Biden people were more likely to get vaccinated and wear masks. Imagine.

But even in Blue states we don’t seem to be keeping up with other industrialized nations, health-wise. “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,” Krugman writes. He doesn’t mention that for worse outcomes we’re still spending far and away more per capita on health care than any other nation on the planet. Hmmm. Well, don’t get me started.

But right on cue, here’s another news story from ProPublica about increasing numbers of new parents who are refusing to allow their newborns to receive a standard vitamin K shot. And some babies have died as a result. A bleeping vitamin K shot. It’s not even a vaccine or some kind of newfangled pharmaceutical invention. It’s vitamin K. We all have some in our bodies. It occurs naturally in food, especially in the dark green leafy things like spinach and kale  But it’s kind of hard to get a newborn to eat spinach or kale.

I take it some babies are born with a K deficiency that makes them susceptible to hemorrhaging easily. One of the things K does for us is help our blood to clot. A shot at birth has been a standard preventative measure for some time. But that makes it suspect to some people.

A lot of the anti-medical science culture in the U.S. is being fueled by people pushing “alternative” cures. Krugman:

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.

Anti-intellectualism goes back a long way in American history, long before there was MAGA. See Richard Hofstadter, for example.  But now it’s being allowed to craft our health care policies. So stay well.