In the backwards South

Gov. Asa Hutchinson truly faced the nation Sunday morning on a television news show that CBS aptly calls “Face the Nation.”

The host, John Dickerson, introduced Hutchinson by noting that the covid Delta variant is spreading and that Arkansas has one of the nation’s lowest covid vaccination rates and highest rates of infections and hospitalizations.

Basically, he was asking our governor what the heck our problem is and what he was going to do about it.

The implied question was whether we ever get tired of looking backward. Or perhaps that was my inference.

Either way, we apparently don’t. As you know, Hutchinson is interested in a national political profile after he is term-limited as governor in January 2023. It turns out that we tend to produce prominent national politicos out of proportion to our backwardness otherwise.

So, Hutchinson likes to do these national shows. He says they help the state, though it’s not evident how this one did, or how the full collection of them has.

He also admits to wanting to advance a less-Trumpian, more-moderate national Republican profile.

Thus he’s a willing network target in the low-vaccination community, though Arkansas—let’s be clear—is not the least-vaccinated state in the country. In the latest compilation I saw of full vaccinations as a percentage of population, we were 49th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. We lead by a percentage point or so those paragons of progressivism called Alabama and Mississippi.

First the South got slavery wrong. Now this.

Anyway, Hutchinson, ever the slicer and dicer, said one of the main problems is that there has been a lack of a sense of urgency about getting vaccinated. He said that maybe the uptick in hospitalizations would cause some of these anti-vaccination people to sense urgency anew and go get the shot or shots.

That doesn’t explain why Arkansas has viewed vaccinations with less urgency than every state except the two worst ones.

The governor would say, I’m sure, knowing how he is, that it’s not going to do our vaccination rate any good for a guy with a column to ridicule people in the paper.

But it hasn’t done much good for the governor to cajole people. And if there is some guy out there who was getting ready to get vaccinated but now won’t because he thinks I called him stupid, well, either Forrest Gump or his mama had something to say about that.

Hutchinson referred during the CBS interview to an email opposing vaccinations he’d received from a businessman just that morning. I fired off a missive asking the governor who that businessman was and what reasoning his correspondent might have offered.

The governor wouldn’t identify his correspondent, but he sent me this citation from the email, saying he had no elaboration to offer: “Medical professionals guess every day at fixing people’s conditions. Scientists guess every day (hypothesis) on cures. Statistics are facts, and people should be able to make decisions off of unmanipulated facts, not manipulated pushes for them to do what the government wants.”

It’s not clear what is being manipulated in these calculations of increased hospitalizations and scant vaccinations, and the circumstantial evidence of a relationship thereof.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that Vermont has vaccinated 64.6 percent of its population and reported seven new cases and seven hospitalizations Friday. It says Arkansas has vaccinated 33.6 percent of its population and reported 302 new cases and 291 hospitalizations Friday.

Of course, Arkansas has five times as many people as Vermont. Perhaps that explains why it has more than 40 times as many cases and hospitalizations.

Maybe the governor’s correspondent believes the government is making all that up merely to fortify some sinister drive to get people to submit to vaccinations.

Maybe I’m guilty of manipulating that data. I’ll admit I’m juxtaposing it for purposes of making a point.

But that would still be no reason for you to decline to protect yourself by getting a simple shot.

Here’s some other data—or a report of data—for me to manipulate to make a point: Pollsters say the best categorical predictor anymore of whether a person leans Republican or Democrat is whether that person is vaccinated against covid.

I asked the governor if it wasn’t so that obstinacy against covid vaccines simply reflected how far American conservatism had devolved.

He did not respond, for which I don’t blame him a bit.