NPR: “There are more than enough shots to go around in communities like Hartsville, Tenn. – the seat of Trousdale County, a quiet town dropped in the wooded hills northeast of Nashville. It’s a county that is nearly 90% white and where Donald Trump won nearly 75% of the votes in 2020. There was no special planning to reach underserved communities here, other than the inmates at the state prison, which experienced one of the nation’s largest correctional facility outbreaks of COVID-19. But now Tennessee, like much of the nation, is finding that rural white residents need a little more coaxing to roll up their sleeves for the shot. This week, the state published results from a statewide survey, and a focus group of unvaccinated residents. More than 45% of white rural conservatives said they were unwilling to even consider taking the vaccine.”

“‘There’s nothing inherently unique about living in a rural area that makes people balk at getting vaccinated. It’s just that rural areas have a larger share of people in the most vaccine-resistant groups: Republicans and White Evangelical Christians,’ says Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation. KFF’s latest survey data finds that more rural residents have been fully vaccinated than urban dwellers. But this is likely because there haven’t been the same long waits in rural areas, to get the vaccine. And now the initial demand has tapered to a drip. Currently, the number of rural residents (21%) saying they’ll never get the vaccine is twice the number (10%) in urban areas. On a recent weekend in Hartsville, the local health department had trouble filling up even half the spots for a COVID vaccination event at the high school. Down the street at the Piggly Wiggly grocery store, Cris Weske, 43, stopped in to buy a can of dipping tobacco. He says he isn’t even tempted to get the COVID vaccine, no matter how widely available it is. ‘Somebody like me that’s healthy, with a survival rate of 99%, I don’t need it,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to put that toxin – I’m kind of anti-vax, period.’ Weske, who is wearing a ‘We the People’ T-shirt, says the U.S. Constitution protects his choice to opt out of massive nationwide vaccination effort.”