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Trump Country Rejects Vaccines Despite Growing Delta Threat
(Bloomberg) -- Larry Krauck awoke in a strange hospital, the date written on a dry-erase board in his room: Dec. 12, 2020.
That can’t be right, he thought. He remembered being treated for Covid-19 at a different hospital in Springfield, Missouri, on Nov. 1. Could the last six weeks really be blank? He told a nurse her board was wrong.
She slipped out of the room and returned with a summary of his procedures, scrawled on a sticky note, including thirty-three days on a blood oxygenation machine called an ECMO. One day, Krauck had flat-lined and was resuscitated.
Krauck, 50 at the time, caught the coronavirus and nearly died well before vaccines were available. Since his ordeal, he’s become an advocate for the shots — the type of local, trusted messenger that health officials hope can woo the skeptical.
“I tell people all the time: you don’t want to be me,” he said in an interview. But where he lives, deep in Trump country where doubts run strong about vaccines and the virus, his tale of a near-death experience is only occasionally enough to persuade acquaintances — even close family — to get their shots. ..............(more)
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/trump-country-rejects-vaccines-despite-growing-delta-threat-1.1626073
25 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
In Springfield, vaccine doubters include Krauck’s niece, Jennifer Davis. She hasn’t had a shot and isn’t inclined to get one. Four of her five children, all of whom are eligible, are also unvaccinated; she worries that a daughter who got the shots will suffer side effects.
She and her uncle are close and speak fondly of each other. But Davis, 41, believes the vaccines were developed too quickly and that a series of illnesses suffered by friends and their families are broadly linked to other vaccines. She wonders why people line up for shots, and trusts doctors less after a previous recommendation led to complications and a hysterectomy. Coronavirus doesn’t seem that dangerous to her — even given Krauck’s experience.
“There hasn’t been enough research done on it, and I’d rather take my chances with the virus than I would to get the vaccine. I trust my immune system,” Davis said in an interview. “If I get it, and it’s my time to die, then I get it and it’s my time to die.”
Davis supports Trump, but says not even the former president could change her mind. “It’s silly that people think just because one man says ‘go get it,’ that we’re going to line up and do it. Because it’s not going to happen.”
Across the region, health officials lament the politicization of vaccines. So does Davis. She believes incentives for shots, like lotteries and other giveaways, fuel doubts about their safety, and she questions why other crucial medicines, like insulin, aren’t also distributed for free.
Sounds like a sheepish thing to do! 
Per CNN
Incidentally, these are the fools who largely decide what the federal government can accomplish due to its undemocratic nature: electoral college, equal Senate representation for states whether they have tiny or huge populations, supermajority requirements, minority abuse of filibuster, gerrymandering, etc. And it will likely get worse if all the voter suppression and nullification bills pass.
Incidentally, these are the fools who largely decide what the federal government can accomplish due to its undemocratic nature: electoral college, equal Senate representation for states whether they have tiny or huge populations, supermajority requirements, minority abuse of filibuster, gerrymandering, etc. And it will likely get worse if all the voter suppression and nullification bills pass.
