I've seen (or heard) lots of stories on lagging rural vaccination rates this week, so this post is just to collect them, and to quote from the most innovative/qualitative and least data driven, as you'll see below.
The Los Angeles Times reported today about low vaccination rates in far northern California. The headline is "Rural Northern California is falling behind in vaccinations, and COVID-19 cases are rising."
Jose del Real reported for The Press-Democrat (Sonoma County, California) a few days ago under the headline, "Five days, 100 vaccine doses and a wildfire of conspiracy theories." An excerpt from the story (which was picked up by the Washington Post), featuring much more than data, follows:
For months, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories had ripped across northern California’s wine country, invisible wildfires of untruth spreading through some of the country’s most vulnerable communities. They were particularly damaging among the low-income Mexican and Mexican American families whose labor powers the region’s large agricultural economy.
The most common rumor was that the coronavirus vaccines caused infertility, which some said was part of a government plot to keep immigrants from having U.S.-born children. Even more fantastical beliefs circulated. There were suspicions that there were microchips embedded in the vaccines that could be used by the government to track undocumented workers. Others called it “La Vacuna de la Muerte,” the Vaccine of Death, and said that those who were inoculated would die in 10 years. Many also believed the false claim that mass abortions had been necessary to produce the vaccines.
The disinformation began to spread outward from Spanish-language YouTube and Facebook videos rendered in dense, scientific-sounding terms but laden with conspiracy theories. The false claims, often peddled by people who described themselves as doctors, were shared tens and hundreds of thousands of times. Those glossy clips were followed by articles from self-proclaimed wellness gurus and reactionary social media posts that danced across WhatsApp, a private mobile messaging application popular in Latin America.
Other stories focus primarily on the South. Shalina Chatlani reported for NPR on June 1, "Mississippi Community Health Center Is Crucial To Vaccinating Rural Residents."
This May 31story from Blake Farmer at the NPR affiliate in Nashville is headlined, "Why Are Southern States Lagging In Vaccinations?"
Looking back a few weeks, NPR's Consider This podcast on May 21 was headlined, "NPR Analysis Finds Growing Vaccine Divide Between Urban And Rural America."
This isn't so much a rural story, but one about how a state with extensive rural territory--and a state that has done an exceptionally good job of reaching its remote areas. Now, however, the state is offering COVID-19 vaccines to tourists, hoping it will bring visitors back to a state heavily reliant on a tourist economy.
Here's coverage from the New York Times on vaccination progress at the state level.
Here's an April NPR story about vaccine hesitancy in northeast Tennessee.
Here's a mid-May story out of the Gulf States Newsroom. It's not focused on rural whites, but is somewhat focused on southern whites.
This is a commentary in the Daily Yonder about national journalists parachuting in to rural communities to cover the vaccine hesitancy story.
P. S. From the Daily Yonder on June 3, 2021.
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