American novelist and poet John Updike once said “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” and we couldn’t agree more—especially if you’re into astrology. Utah’s Salt Lake county health department has just revealed there is a big difference in vaccination rates throughout the Zodiac signs. “At least, that’s what officials found when they analysed anonymised data on 1.2 million residents, providing a table of the least and most vaccinated star signs,” added The Guardian.
The health authorities’ results showed that Leos—one of the most compassionate signs—were the most vaccinated, at 70 per cent, closely followed by people with the Aquarius sign (67 per cent). Scorpios (the most complicated star sign, clearly) came last—only 46 per cent were vaccinated, with Virgos (50 per cent) coming in a close second-to-last.
Speaking about whether these numbers can be trusted or taken with a pinch of salt, head of data and visuals at The Guardian US, Alvin Chang explained how, in order to figure out what percentage of people of each sign are vaccinated, the county had to find two numbers: “How many people of each Zodiac sign are vaccinated. Salt Lake county did this using anonymised state data. That’s likely quite accurate.”
He continued with the second element, “How many people of each Zodiac sign live in the county overall. They estimated this by looking at the nationwide distribution of Zodiac signs, using data from the University of Texas-Austin. Then they assumed their county would have a similar distribution. But the distribution of when people are born can vary from state to state, and even more from county to county.”
Long story short, sorry to break it to all the horoscope fanatics out there, but Utah might have rushed things a bit. This is further proven when looking at another table, which details how common each Zodiac sign in the US actually is.
“This table is a near-exact inverse of the vaccination one,” wrote The Guardian. This means that, while Scorpios came last in Salt Lake’s table for vaccination, they are also the most commonly represented star sign in the US population—Americans like to procreate around the holiday period it seems. The opposite was true for Leos and Aquarians—the least common Zodiac signs in the US population yet still taking the highest spots in the vaccination table.
“That’s probably why Leos—one of the least common signs—have the highest rates of vaccination [according to Utah’s Salt Lake county health department]; the county is probably undercounting the number of Leos there,” added Chang.
Wrong data put aside, Nicholas Rupp, a Salt Lake health department spokesperson, also shared that the research also faced backlash from hardcore astrology fans—criticising the authorities for analysing data using Sun signs instead of Moon signs. Rookies…