That’s an issue we should be addressing. I’ve reached the point where I’m OK with anti-vaxxers refusing the vaccine. Think of it as a weak selective event, the funny part is that many of these people are social Darwinists and are happy to let the poor die. If the rest of us get our second dose nature will take it’s course with that element, and hopefully when the next biomedical catastrophe occurs the sanity challenged portion of society will be smaller.
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Some of them provide substantial clues through their choice of apparel.
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My guess these counties are the “redest” with the most evangelicals.
I think you are missing the point. The counties the article focuses on are reliably blue. Their population is predominately poor. Many are heavily minority. Johnson County, Kansas is a very affluent heavily white county. (It grew in the 60s because of white flight across the Missouri boarder after Brown v. Board.)
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I appreciate the remark @ronbyers, but these people aren’t Democrats. If they are, it’s by habit or family. I worked all over KS and MO and the city both sides. These folk are long lost to the Trump/Evangelical cult, rich or poor.
This disease is killing the gullible. Considering it’s the gullible that got us into this mess, I say long may they dodge these vaccines, and long may their carpools be, and circular the air-conditioning.
To a fair extent, this problem will resolve itself over time. When people see friends and relatives getting it and being OK, many will get it. We also do need to open things up even more for vaccinated people, so that there is a real tangible reward for getting the shots. The vaccine is really good, much better than the flu shot, and once you’ve been vaccinated you should be able to come and go as you did before the pandemic.
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Just look for the red hat. Or the confederate flag on the back of their pickemup truck.
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So, people that don’t vote?
but four months of data shows less educated — and often heavily Republican— counties have been slower to vaccinate
Change “slower” to “completely unwilling” and this becomes far closer to reality…
You might say that God has sent a plague to kill the ignorant and those too easily convinced by the internet.
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(pedant alert), Not exactly, because most of these idiot vax deniers have already reproduced. You gotta get 'em while they’re young, kill them off before they have a chance to make babies. Someone screwed up the design of this virus. It’s hitting the wrong age groups.
And on that theme, I wonder if vaccine skeptics would be so willing to avoid vaccinations if Covid only affected their kids, and was just as deadly as it is for someone over 65 with co-morbidities? They might be singing a different tune. And every kid’s death caused by a parent who was a vax denier would then be a Darwinian reduction of the idiot gene pool.
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We don’t have the demographic information from the article that would allow you to jump to the conclusion that the counties in question are predominately Republican. In the case of the Kansas counties cited it is just the opposite. Wyandotte County is a Democratic stronghold. Johnson County is the heart of suburban Republicanism.
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I prefer to think that they have been raptured by their god.
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Wow. Who knew besides everybody?
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It doesn’t work that way (see my other post about Darwinism). “Nature taking its course” only improves the gene pool when people die before they’re old enough to reproduce.
Even aside from that, it’s a terrible idea to let “nature take its course,” because nature in the form of Covid is using unvaccinated people as a mass petri dish to breed new variants.
Let that go on long enough – and I’m talking months, not years – and we’ll get more variants of the virus that are highly resistant to the current vaccines. Eventually completely resistant, and then we’re all back to square one.
This is a race against variants, and we’re losing that race in some of these areas in the US. It may already be lost in places like India and Central/South America that are having massive new outbreaks and they’re not getting the vaccines rolled out fast enough.
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COVID running rampant through Hopes And Prayers Land.
Who woulda thunk it?
I wonder if this article might be re-phrased as “counties that were failing their residents before the pandemic continue to do so”
There are a lot of places where the county lines include a lot of poor people but the county government is elected by, and governs in benefit of, the wealthy (white) voters. These voters prioritize low taxes over effective services, because they travel elsewhere for services and don’t consider the people who need services as truly their neighbors.
It would be interesting to compare vaccination rates between places like Wyandotte County and Tribal communities. Poverty, ill-health and mistrust of the government are common in Indian country, but my impression was that the tribes had done a reasonably good job with vaccination. I suspect there’s a different relationship between tribal governments and tribal residents than between most county governments and their most vulnerable residents
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