Republican governor in the US refutes anti-vaccines 1:29
(CNN) -
It seemed as if Covid-19 was cornering us in the five days in August that this CNN team spent in Carter County, Missouri.
In Van Buren, the largest city in the county, we were sitting next to a 16-year-old teenager when she received a text message that her school was going to establish an order for the use of masks since 20 of her classmates had tested positive after just two days of class.
One person we wanted to interview had to go to the hospital due to a post-vaccination infection.
Yet another learned the night just before our interview that she had been exposed to COVID-19 by a sick child from her church.
Older adults and people with underlying diseases are at increased risk of severe post-vaccination infection
People gossiped about who was infected and where, and if there was someone in town who knew they were sick but refused to self-quarantine.
"Everyone is scared. Everyone is catching it. It's almost like a plague," said Brandon Helve, who had COVID-19 three weeks earlier but still didn't want to get vaccinated yet, he said. He believed they were not yet tested.
CNN visited Carter County, in the Ozark Mountains in October 2020, when the coronavirus was barely reaching rural America.
Back then, the debate was about the use of masks, and it was highly politicized.
"We sit in the cafeteria and we see someone wearing a mask and we think, 'Democrat,' Brian Keathleyen said last fall, weeks before contracting the virus.
Carter County has a population of just 6,000. Van Buren has about 820 residents. It's the kind of place where everyone knows each other, and everyone knows who has COVID-19. We returned in August to see what had changed from the previous fall and what had not, as well as to find out if the people on this site had so many acquaintances who had become ill, only 27% of the county is fully vaccinated. “I got both doses of the vaccine, and people just acted like, 'Oh, that doesn't help,'” Cheryl Wetton said. “It bothers me sometimes that people act like COVID-19 is a joke. I always want to say, 'Well, why don't you come to the cemetery and I will show you my husband's grave? And I can show you that it is not a joke ”.
Wetton actually said that to a guy in town, he later confirmed.
"He was just very quiet."
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"If you have it, everyone knows it. And they are talking about you," Tara Chitwood said. She worked at the cash register of a gift shop, replacing her mother who had caught the infection a few days before. It was "most likely "Covid-19, Chitwood said, because one of her mother's friends had tested positive. But her mother probably wouldn't get tested.
It was a scary thing, Chitwood said.
His little daughter had to quarantine herself.
But there was "no way" for her to get vaccinated.
His mother had been vaccinated and got sick anyway.
"I've survived up to here," Chitwood said, and expressed the fatalism that we have heard so much: you have to die of something, one day.
Reasons not to get the covid-19 vaccine that don't make sense: we debunk the myths of our audience
The most recent wave is the worst to date
This wave of covid-19 in Carter County is much worse than last year, according to its public health center.
August was the worst month on record.
The health center announced the new cases on Facebook, amid pleas for patience due to the increase in calls.
August 20: 4 new cases.
August 21: 4 new cases.
August 22: 3 new cases.
August 23: 17 new cases, 1 death.
August 24: 16 new cases.
August 25: 18 new cases.
August 26: 16 new cases.
August 30: 30 new cases.
August 31: 22 new cases.
September 1: 18 new cases, 1 death.
The case count was divided into confirmed and probable because the health center did not have enough PCR tests, the most sensitive available.
On August 31, the health center announced that the state health department would send a team to do free PCR tests weekly.
When we called Cricket Kester, the phone had a poor connection and he couldn't hear us: "If it's family, please call again. If not, we're too sick to talk to anyone."
Mandates and testing, among Biden's strategies to combat the delta variant outbreak
We called again, and Kester said she was glad.
She and her husband were vaccinated this spring and contracted post-vaccination infections.
He thought they would be dead without the vaccine, and he told us to spread the word that everyone should get vaccinated.
The coffee shop we had filmed in 2020 had just closed for two weeks, and everyone we spoke to in town had heard that the people who worked there had gotten sick.
At the health center, they said the rumor had prompted a wave of people to get tested for covid-19.
Some city dwellers knew the owners personally and were concerned about them, but they did not respond to CNN's request for comment.
Most of the people we spoke to knew exactly the last time they had eaten there.
Carter County, Missouri, is experiencing an increase in covid-19, which according to the local health center is worse than the first outbreak of 2020.
Delta variant drives death toll and anxiety
The Current River runs through Van Buren.
It's fast and clear, and every summer thousands of tourists come to sail or float on it.
It is almost three miles of a joyous and often drunken party that passes between picnics on gravel bars and children jumping off cliffs.
That means that many jobs are in the service sector, and few people are able to work from home.
"They want to hide that they are sick so they can work," says Debbie Turley.
"They don't get vaccinated. They don't get tested. They hide their symptoms if they can. And they just go out into the community and spread the virus."
Sometimes a rumor spread that Covid-19 was haunting a restaurant, Turley said.
The locals would stay away, but the tourists wouldn't know it.
Tourists floating down the Current River in Van Buren, Missouri.
Turley had already had COVID-19 and was vaccinated, and she also wore masks.
"In fact, this week I was exposed by someone who didn't know they were sick, but did have a cough, and they didn't stay home," she said.
She had also been to the cafeteria a few times not long before it closed.
"No one has died in a long time, so people have been slow to get serious," said Jim Rodebush.
The delta variant is what made it more serious.
"It spread very fast. Fifteen people have died here, I suppose."
(Now there are 16 in Carter County).
Rodebush's wife, Ruth, battled cancer for 12 years, he said.
Covid-19 killed her in eight days.
She died on July 20, 2021. "I spoke to her until the Sunday before she died," Rodebush said.
"She said, 'This is bad, I think you all have to get vaccinated.' And I think she's right."
Neither of them had been vaccinated.
Ruth had said her doctor had told her not to get vaccinated because of her chemotherapy, Rodebush said.
"I was quite skeptical about it until I saw everything that happened," he said.
Now, plan to get vaccinated.
ANALYSIS |
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When Ruth was dying, the hospital called around 2:30 in the morning, so Rodebush and her son went to see her. The COVID-19 ward was creepy: dark, everyone in protective gear, patients on respirators, what he knew was the end of the line. "There is nothing good about it," he said. "I don't want to go back into one."
They had seen our 2020 report for CNN, and he thought it was an "invention."
He knew everyone who appeared in the video, each and every one of them.
At the time, he thought they were wrong about wearing the masks, but now it was more visceral.
"Those guys sitting in the cafeteria don't know what they're talking about when they talk about covid. They have to take a walk through the covid room. That will change their mind. Stay there for a day. See if you like it. So it's a different story. ".
Too "stubborn" to get the vaccine
This is not a place that has a lot of information coverage at the national level.
And it is difficult to integrate socially.
People take care of each other in times of joy and crisis, but newcomers can be there for 10 years without really fitting in, Rodebush said.
This meant that almost everyone had seen our latest story.
Rodebush wanted us to discuss it with his partner, Wayland Bland.
He called him and, after convincing him a bit, Bland entered the driveway of his house in his truck and asked us to engrave the blue scarf on his face.
He wanted us to film him saying, "I'm a Republican and I wear this mask."
Last fall, Bland spent seven days in the hospital with COVID-19.
He had undergone a kidney transplant and knew it was high risk.
Last year, Rodebush said, "He and Ruth and I sat down and talked about it, and we both said, 'If we catch it, we'll die from it.
But Bland lived.
"What did you tell them, that I'm the toughest guy around?" Bland said.
It was exactly what his friend had said.
"They put everything they had on me: steroids, full drip, plasma from people who had had COVID, drugs that they gave to my president, (Donald) Trump. And finally they took it away from me," Bland said.
But he did not want to be vaccinated.
"I'm not going to put that shit on. I'm not going to take it," Bland said.
He did not want to elaborate on why until pressured to explain why he would rely on drugs like Regeneron's antibody cocktail but not the vaccine.
He turned to Rodebush and asked:
"Am I going to have to tell him?"
Rodebush laughed and shrugged.
Rodebush's friend Wayland Bland, right, survived COVID-19 in 2020 and wears face masks indoors, but remains unvaccinated.
"They beat up my president," Bland said.
He thought the vaccine was intentionally delayed to harm Trump, an unsubstantiated claim.
"They did not give it to him because they know very well that he would be re-elected and there would be nothing to do. So they had to cheat and scheme not to give it to him, and as soon as the elections were over, bam! There we have it."
"I'm so stubborn. They took my president from me. I'm not going to take your medicine," he said.
"I'll take what they gave him, but I'm not going to take yours."
When reminded that Trump had urged people to get vaccinated, Bland said he hadn't seen that.
In fact, Trump himself was vaccinated, and although he had joked that there might be a vaccine for the 2020 election, the vaccine developers and federal officials were always clear that the rollout depended on when the data arrived.
"I don't watch the news because they have made me very angry," Bland said.
However, he was willing to hang out with our CNN crew over a few beers on the Rodebush porch.
Why was Trump booed in Alabama?
1:28
Doubts about vaccines loom over those who feel "lost," according to a doctor
Public health officials have to understand the culture here, said Dr. Chris Cochran, an internist at a hospital just over an hour away in West Plains. There are no hospitals in Carter County, and West Plains is one of the places people go for medical care. Cochran grew up in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas, with a population of about 1,000, and no longer has a first name there, he said. People just call him "Doc".
"I never want to give anyone an excuse to do something like not get vaccinated. But the reasons do come from someone who has been told by the rest of the country their whole life that they are a dumb little town," Cochran said.
"I don't know if we are oppressed or disenfranchised. And I don't know if we even deserve to feel that way here. But we are a passing state. ... We are a people who consider themselves lost to the rest of the world."
We heard that many times: that the media called people stupid townspeople.
But we didn't say that, and neither did our CNN bosses, or our friends in New York.
Still, people here continue to feel singled out, treated as a separate population from the rest of the country, Cochran said.
In Missouri, as well as Arkansas and Tennessee, many people have said that they are at peace with the possibility of dying from COVID-19 because they know they are right with God.
"If I lose the battle against him, I know where I'm going. I'm going to heaven," Helvey said.
And Tom Wilder said: "I think that if the good Lord wants me right now, it doesn't matter if I get the beef or not. If he wants me to go, he will take me."
Van Buren is located in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri.
They secretly offer vaccines for fear of what they will say
This kind of "fatalism" usually disappears, according to Cochran, with the intimacy of an individual visit to his office.
But what remains is peer pressure not to get vaccinated.
"People have come together for safety, as people do in any crisis," he said.
But misinformation has been introduced into those circles, and attempts to correct it have caused them to close further.
"It is a real, severe and strong pressure in his church, in his family, in his group of friends, in his group of Facebook friends, whatever," Cochran said.
"People are under such pressure not to get vaccinated for their by their group that it is, for them, something of an act of treason."
Patients have asked if they can secretly get vaccinated.
"We can put the vaccine in their arm where it's needed," Cochran said.
The hospital makes them drive to the parking lot of their pharmacy, as if it were something else, and the staff "prick their arm while they are sitting in their car."
Some people in Missouri are secretly getting vaccinated against COVID-19, says a doctor.
They fear a backlash from loved ones who oppose vaccines
"When I tell people that they have trouble admitting they were wrong about the vaccine and the disease, I precede it with 'I was wrong too,'" Cochran explained.
At the beginning of the pandemic, he knew that COVID-19 was serious, but he underestimated its power to spread.
In the spring of 2020, a woman stopped him in the supermarket parking lot.
"He told me: 'Doctor, what do you think about this COVID thing? Do you think it will reach us?"
And I said to her, 'Ma'am, I don't think it's going to get here, like many things, it consumes itself before it reaches the middle of nowhere like us.' "He said he was glad to hear it.
"Well, about six months later, his mother died of covid," Cochran said.
"It wasn't my fault that she died of covid, but I can't forgive myself for what I said to that woman. So my job now is to move on and make sure that I help as many people as I can who are having trouble coping with the fact that everyone we have been wrong to a certain extent. "
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It is difficult for people to change their minds in a place without anonymity.
It's been a bit strange for Keathley after our October 2020 interview. People would stop him even in Branson and ask him if he was the guy from the CNN video.
Some said it was amazing, he said.
A lady yelled at him because her friends had died from covid-19.
And people were watching him carefully.
Chitwood pointed out that Keathley walked into the gift shop all the time.
He cited his line about Democrats being the only ones wearing face masks.
"I saw him in a game with a sunset," he said.
"I was like, hahaha."
Word spread quickly when he fell ill with covid-19.
Brian Keathley from Carter County, Missouri speaks with CNN's Elle Reeve.
On our second night in town in August, we met Keathley at the Mexican restaurant and found out later that after we left, he had told the whole restaurant that we were journalists for CNN and that this time he was not going to talk to us on camera.
When we met him the second time in a coffee shop, it seemed like fate.
He was having breakfast with Aly Morris, his 16-year-old niece.
Morris said random people were yelling from across the room that they recognized Keathley from the television.
It seemed great to her.
Aly didn't like wearing a mask, and she thought her teachers had been harsh on her.
But he was vaccinated, he said.
Aly wants to be a doctor and couldn't imagine telling patients to get vaccinated when she hadn't done it herself.
Keathley watched as Aly spoke.
He said he didn't want to speak on camera.
But it relented.
He had been quite arrogant in 2020. "I guess if it touches me and it kills me then it will be a slow walk and a sad song for the family," Keathley said at the time.
What would you want on your tombstone?
"He was not wearing a mask."
Now, covid-19 is not as politicized an issue as it was in the fall of 2020, but "it is still a bit political," he said.
"The number 1 reason no one wants to take this vaccine is because the government absolutely, constantly lies. And no one feels they can trust our government. It is not my fault that no one wears a mask. And it is not my fault that no one knows. Get vaccinated. It's the government's fault. "
But was he vaccinated?
Keathley sat with his arms crossed and made a face.
Our CNN team didn't stop begging.
"Please Brian, did you get vaccinated?"
"Whether I have been vaccinated or not should not deter another person from getting vaccinated. If they feel they need it, then they have to."
People feel like they have to secretly get vaccinated, we told Keathley.
He's a big tough guy, he works on the railroad, he's a big mouth ... and everyone knows it.
Maybe it means something, even to a person, coming from him.
"The crown doesn't care who you are," he said.
"If you think you're a big tough guy or if you're - anything - it doesn't matter. If you catch it, it can kill you."
People have to decide if they want to be in a hospital bed and be told that they are going to put him on a respirator and that he may never wake up, he said.
And to hear that his family could never say goodbye.
He had thought: "I don't want my wife to have to wonder ... is she going to go out again?"
"That's why I got vaccinated," Keathley said.
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