Vaccination tour reveals distrust
GOP governor meets hesitancy, hostility amid vaccine push
TEXARKANA, Ark. — Free lottery tickets for those who get vaccinated had few takers. Free hunting and fishing licenses didn’t change many minds either. And this being red-state Arkansas, mandatory vaccinations are off the table.
So Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson has hit the road, meeting face-to-face with residents to try to overcome vaccine hesitancy — in many cases, hostility — in Arkansas, which has the highest rate of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. but is near the very bottom in dispensing shots.
He is meeting with residents like Harvey Woods, who was among five dozen people who gathered at a convention center ballroom in Texarkana on Thursday night. Most of the audience wasn’t masked, and neither was Hutchinson, who has been vaccinated.
Woods, 67, introduced himself to Hutchinson as “anti-vax” and said that he thinks there are too many questions about the effects of the vaccine and that he doesn’t believe the information from the federal government about them is reliable.
Hutchinson embarked on the statewide tour as he took over as chairman of the National Governors Association. In that role, he has called combating vaccine resistance a priority.
The approach is different from that of other Republicans who are portraying health leaders as adversaries even as they try to tamp down cases.Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been selling shirts and other merchandise emblazoned “Don’t Fauci My Florida.” In Missouri, Gov. Mike Parson has suggested some health officials are trying to scare people into getting vaccinated. In Tennessee, the top vaccine official was fired amid GOP anger over her efforts to get teenagers vaccinated.
With the highly contagious delta variant rapidly driving up case counts around the country and filling hospital beds in places like Arkansas and neighboring Missouri, just 35% of Arkansas’ population is fully vaccinated. Only Mississippi and Alabama are lower, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 98% of the people hospitalized in Arkansas since January because of COVID-19 were unvaccinated.
Hutchinson has few tools left at his disposal after signing measures curbing his own authority to respond to the pandemic. They include bans on public schools and other government agencies mandating masks or requiring vaccinations.