The pursuit of truth is never a waste of time.
You'll notice that in your responses, you often criticize the
format of the content, and not the actual content itself, nor do you specifically address the points made. For example:
Attacking the format while ignoring the actual meat and potatoes of the discussion is a classic sign that you are not engaging in a productive manner. What's more useful is to take the data given and perform an analysis on it. I suggest you do that. It's not hard to answer simple, direct, questions.
I think I might have found the problem with your approach to this. Proper understanding of this huge issue necessitates a great deal of data intake, which unfortunately requires reading. If you don't read it, how can you possibly understand it? Please try to at least digest the information before replying. I give you the same courtesy and it would be great if you reciprocate in kind.
Now then, you were saying?
Yeah, I actually did do that. It was in one of my replies to you. But we already established that you don't read them, so that's probably why you missed it.
"Crushed" their economies with mandates and restrictions? That's testable. It's also not pointless to mask your kids, and I gave you data that suggests that, but we'll put that point aside for now. Let's focus on states' economies.
Given that list of worst performers in terms of death, let's take the top 5 most deathly states - Mississippi, Arizona, New Jersey, Alabama, and Louisiana, and analyze their real GPD growth relative to the US average and each other as a whole. Let's also throw in California and Florida.
Here's also a list of all the states and their stances on vaccine passports:
Ballotpedia: The Encyclopedia of American Politics
ballotpedia.org
source:
https://www.bea.gov/
The USA as a whole is neutral grey, and the other states have colors. Generally speaking, we see that everyone tanked in the first half of 2020 but recovered to some extent or another after that. From Q4 2020, the only state to consistently beat the US average was the authoritarian paradise of California. Florida which has a per capita death toll 1K higher than California, was also consistently strong, except for one quarter.
Mississippi beat the US average in Q3 and Q4 of 2020, but has not since then.
Arizona beat the US average in Q4 2020 and Q3 2021.
New Jersey beat the average 3 times.
Alabama beat the average once.
Louisiana beat the average once.
So far not a terrible result but not a great economic showing either for the top 5 most deathly and possibly most freedom loving states.
Now, let's take the 5 terrible states who have the gall to implement a vaccine passport in order to protect their citizens like it's their civic duty or some crazy thing: California, New York, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington. 3 of these states are in the top 10 of fewest deaths per capita in the nation. California is not far behind at #12. New York state is the outlier by being #6 in most deaths per capita, but that's because of the huge megacity that is NYC, as we've already established.
How did these states compare to the US average?
Q3 2020: 2 vaccine passport states beat the US average.
Q4 2020: 2 vaccine passport states beat the US average.
Q1 2021: 4 vaccine passport states beat the US average.
Q2 2021: 4 vaccine passport states beat the US average.
Q3 2021: all 5 vaccine passport states beat or tied the US average.
How did that compare with the 5 most deathly states?
Q3 2020: 3 freedom loving states beat the US average. WIN
Q4 2020: 2 freedom loving states beat the US average. TIE
Q1 2021: 1 freedom loving state beat the US average. LOSS
Q2 2021: 1 freedom loving state beat the US average. LOSS
Q3 2021: 2 freedom loving states beat the US average. LOSS
Not a good economic showing in a comparison of the icky vaccine passport states to the chad freedom loving states.
Again let me reiterate our different approaches to this issue. All you can say is "some places had restrictions and some places didn't. That's the point. The economic negatives aren't worth it". You just state this without providing any data that makes your case or that shows even a hint of correlation at the least.
On the other hand, I organize the data in multiple ways and try to group them into similar categories so that they are somewhat more comparable. We can test the claims and show that the 5 vaccine passport states were able to both maintain sensible mitigation strategies and maintain a reasonable economy while at the same time saving lots of lives. This is demonstrated through charts and graphs and tables, which, unfortunately, all require reading. I hope you did it.