Will people take the vaccine?
In the twilight of President Trump’s administration, Memphis remains its go-to city to tout its federal operations.
The latest was Operation Legend. This past summer, Attorney General William Barr came to Memphis to see how well the Justice Department’s latest initiative was purging the streets of violent criminals — even as poverty and dysfunction continue to spawn their replacements.
Then yesterday, Vice President Mike Pence praised Operation Warp Speed in Memphis.
Operation Warp Speed aims to deliver some 300 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine early next year. Two companies, Moderna and Pfizer, have been putting those vaccines through trials, and are seeking emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration to begin to distribute them.
Seeing that Memphis is home to Fedex, the shipping behemoth that will likely transport much of the vaccine, it made sense that Pence, who was joined by Fedex founder, chairman and CEO Fred Smith at a roundtable at the Air National Guard hangar, would extol the administration’s progress here.
But what makes no sense is that Gov. Bill Lee, who attended the roundtable, touted the rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine that will require people to put something into their bodies when in the meantime, he won’t require people to simply put something on their faces to prevent it.
That something being a mask.
As of Thursday, 388,252 cases of COVID-19 have been recorded among Tennesseans, and those numbers have been increasing by more than 3,000 a day, according to the state health department.
Nearly 5,000 have died.
Part of the reason for those obscene numbers may be linked to Tennessee being one of only 13 states to shun mask mandates. But while Shelby County and Memphis have issued such mandates, during a November video call the mayors of West Tennessee’s rural counties lamented Lee’s unwillingness to issue one.
Their reasons are obvious.
It’s tough to slow the spread of COVID-19 if, say, one county has no masking or social distance requirements and the one next to it does. That means people in counties without mask requirements can spread the pandemic and put additional strain on the hospitals and medical systems in Shelby County.
The burden on hospitals was especially a concern for Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo and Bartlett Mayor Keith Mcdonald, who urged Lee to issue a statewide mask mandate after seeing COVID-19 patients from outside their municipals fill hospitals.
A statewide mask mandate, in fact, would give cover to local officials who know that masks work, but are faced with confronting people who oppose masks based on fiction and not science.
Still, Lee said he prefers to leave those decisions to the counties and municipalities.
Operation Warp Speed will be good for Fedex, and the impending vaccine will likely be good news for people who want to confront the pandemic as history, not as a daily reality.
But if the governor can’t muster the political will to help mayors do the heavy lifting in pushing mask mandates, and in dismantling ridiculousness about masks being ineffective or worse, dangerous, then how will he lead when it’s time to persuade people to take the vaccine that Pence talked up in Memphis?
Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who also joined Pence, Lee, and others at the roundtable, admitted it would be a challenge to get people to trust the vaccine. But in the meantime, Redfield stressed that people use masks — because they work.
Without a statewide mask mandate, the success of the vaccine may be undercut because a lot of opposition to masks is rooted in mistrust. But Lee can be a leader in eroding that kind of mistrust by leading with the data.
As he should.
Because it makes no sense for COVID-19 to kill Tennesseans because they didn’t trust a mask before they get the chance to try a vaccine that would eliminate the need for one.
You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Tonyaa Weathersbee at 901568-3281, tonyaa.weathersbee@com mercialappeal.com or follow her on Twitter @tonyaajw.