While he broke with the fearmongering over people going door-to-door to help with vaccination rates we've seen on the right, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson still refused to acknowledge the elephant in the room as to what's causing the vaccine hesitancy in the first place.
During an interview on ABC's This Week, Hutchinson was asked about coronavirus cases which are soaring in his state and neighboring Missouri, who "now lead the nation with the highest weekly case rates per capita." While Hutchinson sounded like he has a lot more sense than Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, who asked for help from the federal government before saying he didn't want anyone going door-to-door trying to "compel" anyone to get vaccinated, Hutchinson responded with this nonsense when asked why there was a "partisan divide on vaccinations."
HUTCHINSON: Well, you know, there shouldn't be a partisan divide first of all. But, clearly, conservative is more hesitant about government authority. That's just the nature of it. And so, I think in the Southern states and some rural states, you have that more conservative approach, skepticism about government.
And we just have to answer it just like we have all through history, that you overcome skepticism and mistrust by truth. You overcome resistance and obstinance with saying it's important for our community, and it's important for the health of our state and nation.
And so, I think that's simply the nature of different views of government. We’ve got to overcome that mistrust because it -- Republicans, Democrats, we all suffer the same consequence if the delta variant hits us and we're not vaccinated.
Of course, missing from that response was any mention of Fox "news," or OANN, or his fellow Republicans in the Congress who are constantly telling lies about the safety of the vaccines, and who have been doing everything in their power to kill off as many of their constituents as humanly possible since the pandemic began.
To his credit, here's his response that the Governor of Missouri could take a lesson from on the door-to-door visits and the way others like Parson have behaved trying to turn it into something nefarious.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Now, he made it clear that he didn't mean having federal officials necessarily be going door to door. But there is a federal outreach effort.
Are you going to be cooperating with that? And how do you respond to some of your fellow governors in the South who say they don't want the federal government to have any part of this?
HUTCHINSON: Well, you know, whatever -- we have a low vaccination rate, we want all the help we can in order to accomplish a mutual goal and increasing vaccinations.
Long before President Biden said that, we have community organizations that's helping us. We have churches that are going into homes. We have people that go in to those that are bedridden so that they can have access to the vaccine.
So, there's nothing dramatic about what the president said in itself. No one wants an agent knocking on a door. But we do want those that do not have access otherwise to make sure they know about it and having the information.
Not everybody goes on the internet. Not everybody has that access. And so, how do you get information to them?
We want to have our churches involved. We want to have our communities, organizations -- if it means going into a community door by door and letting them know of this, then that's okay.
