New data showing that Missouri life expectancy dropped last year to its lowest level in decades can be explained in part by the echoes of the pandemic a year earlier — but only in part. The state's numbers in the new report continue to be worse than the national average, and they dropped by more in the past two years than they did nationally.

It's worth asking how much of it may be attributable to foot-dragging by state officials in taking both the coronavirus and the opioid crises seriously. Then there's the rise in firearms-related suicides, which should be unsurprising given the state's almost complete lack of safeguards against disturbed people buying guns.

As the Post-Dispatch's Jack Suntrup writes, a report by Missouri's Department of Health and Senior Services found that life expectancy in the state in 2021 fell to 74.6 years, the lowest in the state in about 40 years, based on mortality data. That data included an increase in coronavirus deaths among younger patients, record opioid overdose deaths and increased suicides, the majority of them involving firearms.

These are all to some extent national phenomena. But Missouri remains anchored near the bottom, ranking around 40th nationally in life expectancy in the past few years, according to separate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Missouri report found that coronavirus deaths actually increased in 2021 compared to 2020, when vaccines were unavailable and the pandemic was in full swing. That's partly because death rates among under-65 patients more than doubled in Missouri in 2021, a time when the state's older residents were more likely to be fully vaccinated, while many younger people still weren't.

It's one more example that, yes, the vaccines work. Yet it's a message that the state's Republican leaders seldom hammered as forcefully as they could have for fear of offending a far-right base that views any concession to medical science as lost ground in the culture wars.

Then there were the more-than 1,500 opioid-related deaths in Missouri in 2021, a 15% increase over the year before. The scourge of this national epidemic might have been made worse in Missouri because, until halfway through the year, it was the only state without a process for tracking drug prescriptions to prevent opioid abuse. Gov. Mike Parson finally signed such a system into law in June 2021 — too late to significantly impact the crisis that year — after almost a decade of false starts caused by (again) ideological extremists in the Legislature who viewed such a system as intrusion by big government.

Life-expectancy data is complex, and cause-and-effect theories must be viewed with caution. But Missouri's public policies, mired in right-wing populism that has rejected the legitimate role of government even in confronting crises like opioid abuse, firearms and the pandemic, certainly can't have helped.

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