Rebecca Solnit addresses this constant puzzle of the politicization of death-avoidance in a pandemic:

Some of the most powerful conservatives in the United States have, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, chosen to sow disinformation along with mockery and distrust of proven methods of combating the disease, from masks to vaccines to social distancing. Their actions have afflicted the nation as a whole with more disease and death and economic crisis than good leadership aligned with science might have, and, in spite of hundreds of thousands of well-documented deaths and a new surge, they continue. Their malice has become so normal that its real nature is rarely addressed. Call it biological warfare by propaganda.

It’s true and I never really will understand why. It just doesn’t seem worth it. The political payoff, if any, is so remote and conjectural while the deaths are so prompt and real that it doesn’t seem worth it by any earth-based standard.

Call Jared Kushner the spiritual heir of the army besieging the city of Caffa on the Black Sea in 1346, which, according to a contemporaneous account, catapulted plague-infected corpses over the city walls. This is sometimes said to be how the Black Death came to Europe, where it would kill tens of millions of people – a third of the European population – over the next 15 years.

Except not, though, because this isn’t sending infection to an enemy in wartime, this is sending infection to your own supporters as a matter of political rivalry.

Solnit’s explanation is that they thought it was going to hit cities that vote Democratic much harder than the other kind. Maybe so, but now they know they’re telling their own fans to expose themselves to the virus – in many cases (or most or all?) when they’ve been vaccinated themselves. “I’m vaxxed but you patriots out there, don’t you get that nasty antifa vaccination.”

The worst-hit areas in the country are now Republican-led states and regions. At one point recently, Florida under raging science denier Governor Ron DeSantis, with about 7.5% of the US population, accounted for 20% of all new Covid cases. The governors of Florida and Texas have banned mask mandates, making attempts to protect public health, including that of children, acts of defiance by cities and school districts. DeSantis’s supporters are peddling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” T-shirts and drink coolers with the text “How the hell am I going to drink a beer with a mask on?” On 27 July, as Delta infections proliferated, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted, “Make no mistake – The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.”

Where’s the payoff in that? I’m not seeing it. I think maybe it’s just that they’re so wedded to the habit of playing Opposite Everything that they can’t stop even when they know they’re telling their own voters to die in order to stick it to the libtards.

Call Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham the spiritual heirs of Lord Jeffery Amherst, the British military commander who in 1763 wrote to an underling, “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians?”

…

It’s safe to assume that the Republican leadership knows better, and that some of their followers do and some don’t. Some have chosen to engage in biological warfare; some are merely tools being used in that warfare. That is, some of them are unwitting corpses being catapulted over the walls, unconscious smallpox blankets; some of them are Amherst in spirit. A friend of a friend of mine, a masseuse, had a client who laughed at the end of their session and revealed that her vaccination card was fake: definitely an Amherst.

I’ll never understand people.