Average excess death rates in Florida and Ohio were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats from March 2020 to December 2021, according to a working paper released last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research.But experts are still puzzling over why these differences exist."Vaccination does play a role in the difference that we’ve observed in excess mortality between red and blue places, but it is not the whole story," said Neil Jay Sehgal, an author of that study and an assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Maryland School of Public Health."It may very well be that in Ohio and Florida, because of the nature of Ohioans and Floridians, vaccine uptake may have played a greater role than the country at large," Sehgal said.He added, however, that when it comes to the overall consequences of vaccine hesitancy, "we’re talking about a lot of preventable death and morbidity.""