I have a correction. A couple of days ago I posted a chart of childhood vaccination rates by state plotted against each state's vote for Donald Trump in 2020. Unfortunately, I used the wrong numbers—which by coincidence produced results similar to the correct numbers. Similar, but not the same. Here's the corrected chart:
As with the original chart, there's a slight trend toward red states having lower vaccination rates. However, the fit is still terrible, which means the trendline is basically meaningless. What's more, in the original post I said that of the bottom ten states for childhood vaccinations, eight are red. That's not true. It's actually five red and five blue.
Also, there are no outliers. This chart includes all 50 states except for Montana, which for some reason doesn't report vaccination rates to the CDC.
BOTTOM LINE: If anything, there's now even less evidence for a partisan difference in childhood vaccination rates. There's possibly a very slight correlation, but probably not even that.
This is exactly the conclusion of the original post, but that's just dumb luck.
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Damn - I was really hoping Republicans would continue to kill their own.
As others said about the earlier version, states are too diverse to be very useful. Eastern WA is much more like Idaho than it is to Puget Sound, western NY is a lot like western PA and Ohio, etc. Counting these agglomerations as a whole isn't going to give a clear picture.
Hawaii might seem surprising. My son is a pediatrician there, and spends a lot of his time trying to convince reluctant parents to vaccinate their kids. (I would not have the patience for this. I'd have a hard time not yelling at parents who don't want their kids to get measles shots "Don't you love your child?").
He says the divide is clear: the islanders know that these diseases killed large numbers of them not so long ago and are all in on vaccination. The white "island life" parents are resisters.
He tries to explain the history to them, that white colonists brought these diseases, the islanders know that, and if they want to be welcome, to be accepted, they must not be spreading new epidemics. Sometimes it works.
There is certainly a lot of regional variation. Andrew Wakefield targeted the Somali community in Minnesota, which absolutely cratered their vaccination rates for measles. Add that to the usual left-wing and right-wing refusers, and you've dropped below the trendline.
https://sahanjournal.com/health/measles-mmr-vaccine-minnesota-department-of-health-outreach-somali/#:~:text=The%20rate%20for%20the%20measles,about%2035%20percent%20in%202021.
What is you used counties instead of states?
Yes, shown on a map version - which is easy to do the way we now do everything, with software.
It would be interesting if the data showed the vaccination rate by time for individual states to see the red/blue divide over the last few years.
New York State requires vaccinations for admission to school, and I believe there is no longer any religious exemptions. This would apply to the wealthy counties, where Biden won, and the Trumpy (poorer) counties, where that lying fuckhead won. I guess the unvaccinated kids have a medical exemption or are homeschooled. No idea what happens at the Hasidic communities in Rockland County, but I assume the regulations at all schools apply.
Do most states have similar requirements?
I'm just going to repeat from the other post that the anti-vax movement started on the Republican side among the ignorant and dishonest, and then picked up support everywhere because there are low-information people across the political spectrum. Use counties, or better, education and income levels, and you'll get a different result.