Injection

As NBC’s Chuck Todd likes to remind viewers, if it’s Sunday it’s Meet the Press. But there’s Chris Wallace and his Fox audience to address. George Stephanopoulos and ABC’s This Week get a turn, as does Jake Tapper and CNN. If Telemundo and Al Jazeera haven’t engaged Gov. Hutchinson it may owe to his deficiency in Spanish or Arabic, respectively, though you would think those networks would have translators available.

No matter: For months Mr. Hutchinson has been the go-to Republican guest on the Sunday morning news interview programs, the province of those who The New Yorker’s Calvin Trillin famously dismissed as “Sabbath gasbags.” The Arkansan, then, would be the exception, not simply because the moderators and their producers suddenly prefer sane, articulate public officials as guests (for they don’t always) but because Mr. Hutchinson has been prone to depart from GOP orthodoxy, meaning Trumpism. No other Republican incumbent of any real standing in Arkansas, and only a handful elsewhere, has been as willing as Mr. Hutchinson to break with the Mar-a-Lago line, as he did yet again (if gently) last Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.

The program’s primary focus was the coronavirus – vaccine administration, yes, but also the political and cultural backlash to the medical recommendations and the efforts by state and local governments to mitigate the outbreak. Margaret Brennan, the host, began by inviting the governor to comment on the crisis in which his New York counterpart finds himself. Two scandals, actually; the first involving the misreporting of Covid deaths in nursing homes, the second multiple allegations of sexual harassment. A bit of a delicate matter: Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, is chair of the National Governors Association; Mr. Hutchinson is vice-chair. It’s ultimately New York’s business, Mr. Hutchinson demurred, declining the bait.

But to the issue of Republican recalcitrance over Covid immunization, no hesitation: Yes, the governor answered, he was quite inclined to concur with a CBS News poll reflecting a pronounced partisan divide over coronavirus vaccination. While an overwhelming majority – about 70 percent – of self-identified Democrats and about half of independents have been or plan to be vaccinated, the level of acceptance among Republicans questioned was starkly lower, especially in those aged 65 or younger. A third of the Republicans in the survey flatly rejected the vaccine, and another 20 percent declared themselves undecided.

“[T]he poll numbers are troubling because in Arkansas, it's a very pro-Trump state,” Mr. Hutchinson said. He might have added, though he did not, that Trump has declined to join all three other living former presidents, not to mention the incumbent, in urging his countrymen to take advantage of the vaccine for which he repeatedly has claimed sole credit. In fact he is due some credit, some; one might imagine, might, that he would be happy to spotlight it rather than sulk.

Thus, Mr. Hutchinson said, “we see that resistance” to vaccination.

I saw it on the afternoon my wife and I took the second shot of the two-dose Pfizer immunization sequence. Like much of the world, we’d been anxiously awaiting the development of that or another version, and biding our time until our demographic and occupational profile made us eligible for the needle. When the local drugstore telephoned to say we’d made the list, we made the appointment. And kept it.

So had a couple standing the requisite six feet from us on the afternoon of our presumed deliverance. Well, they were and they weren’t a couple. A husband and wife, yes, judging by the wedding rings and a demeanor suggesting decades of mutual accommodation; but the union ended there. It became apparent that the woman had made the appointments, plural, but that the man was resolved to make their fulfillment, meaning the injection, singular – hers.

For the 15 or so minutes we stood in line behind them, pretending to read from our smartphones, we listened to their sotto voce exchanges as the lady alternately begged and badgered her mate to employ common sense and embrace science. He had no use at that moment of either. Frustrated, she shoved his appointment card into his jacket pocket; irritated, she plopped into the clinician’s chair and bared her arm, her husband standing to one side. Her chauffeur, his evident function. Their car, we observed later, had the bumper sticker that explained much.

Whether from political resistance, cultural suspicion, medical misapprehension or disarray at the management level, Arkansas’s vaccination rate is nowhere near where it should be at this chapter of the Covid drama. Physicians and civic leaders with credibility in minority communities can do much to persuade people of color to do the smart thing. To the skeptical doctors can emphasize the safety of the vaccine. But bridging a political divide? In these times?

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Steve Barnes is a columnist with Editorial Associates in Little Rock.)