This is a great piece in the New Republic about the people nobody talks to: the vaccinated who have to live among those who refuse to get theirs:
We’ve heard repeatedly from the country’s vaccine resisters. But what about the people who follow the rules? They’re ignored and forgotten—and they are in pain.
Divinity was everywhere I looked in Mobile, Alabama. It glinted in the language used to describe the pandemic: the purgatory of its looping ebbs and flows, the perils of congregation, the miracle of vaccines, and the blind devoutness of the sheep inoculated with them. Hoping to tap its deeply religious community’s trust, Mobile County had converted some of the city’s 370-plus places of worship into vaccination clinics. Hoping to boost its health care workers’ morale, local leaders asked the houses of worship to toll their bells each day at noon for eight days of appreciation in August. Even I—a nonbeliever, and a Northerner plopped down in this Bible Belt county of 413,210 people—felt it, too, in the two nuns aboard my flight to Mobile, and the sign outside an abandoned building I kept driving by that proclaimed, ambiguously, SHIELD OF FAITH.
But alongside these spiritual symbols, I also witnessed the grotesque realities of a county battling its worst surge—more than a year and a half into the pandemic and with only about one in three residents vaccinated at the time of my visit (the number was 41 percent as of October 20). When I arrived in late August, the city’s hospitals were overrun with Covid-19 patients, too many of whom would never be discharged. In the ICUs, patients sick with the Delta variant were drowning in air and begging health care workers for vaccines. The Alabama Department of Public Health sent temporary morgue units into the area. “There’s no room to put these bodies,” an emotional Alabama state health officer, Dr. Scott Harris, told reporters at a press conference. The city’s EMS system reached a total saturation point, leading officials to urge residents to stop and consider—before they called 911—whether they really needed an ambulance. “The entire emergency medical system is overwhelmed,” Steven Millhouse, an EMT and spokesperson for Mobile Fire-Rescue, told me. “It’s just way too much.”
Early vaccine uptake had initially inspired genuine hope for the pandemic’s end. Nationwide, people rushed to stadiums, schools, mall food courts, beachfronts, banquet halls, and empty airport hangars to get their shots as soon as they could. Across Alabama, mass vaccine sites quickly hit choke points as demand outstripped the state’s supply. On March 2, Mobile County administered a record-high 4,079 doses—almost 1 percent of the county’s entire population was blessed with partial immunity in a single day. “It was steady, all day long,” Vicki Davis, a registered nurse and vaccinator with the Mobile County Health Department, told me from behind a table at All Saints Episcopal Church, where she and her colleague, another registered nurse, Adrienne Irvin, prepped for the morning’s clinic. “No matter where we were,” Irvin added, “lines.”
Then, in late spring, vaccination stalled. “It was like we reached the number of people who wanted it,” said Carolyn Eichold, a volunteer at that day’s vaccine event. By July, when a CNN crew showed up to film a vaccine pop-up at a food truck festival in Mobile, a mere 12 people got the shot—over three hours. That month, with just 34 percent of its residents inoculated, Alabama earned the undesirable distinction of being the country’s least vaccinated state (it no longer is).
“Sure, I wish we had a line out the door,” Eichold said. That morning, about two dozen people would end up trickling into All Saints. Some were regulars at the church’s weekly food share. Today, planting a seed—not harvesting by the acre—is the goal, Eichold said. “It’s a tremendous relief every time someone comes in,” she said. “I think, ‘We’ve reached somebody, and they can reach somebody.’”
At their station, Davis and Irvin prepared 30 to 40 doses of Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 shots for the morning. “If we did that many, that’s successful,” Davis said. I asked them both how they felt when they got their shots. “It brought a lot of relief,” one of them told me. The other widened her eyes and shook her head no. “I wish you wouldn’t ask me that,” she told me, returning her gaze to a paper in front of her tallying the morning’s recipients. In a few hours, bells at houses of worship would toll for exactly one minute at exactly noon. Tomorrow, Healthcare Prayer and Appreciation Week would be over. You’d have to be amid an ICU’s cacophony or close enough to a mobile morgue’s hum to hear the sound of Mobile’s everlasting Covid-19 crisis.
From the pulpit in 1882, Archdeacon Thomas Colley denounced the evils of inoculation. This “abominable mixture of corruption, the lees of human vice, and dregs of venial appetites,” he preached in a Sunday sermon entitled Vaccination: a Moral Evil; a Physical Curse; and a Psychological Wrong, “in after life may foam upon the spirit, and develop hell within, and overwhelm the soul.”
One hundred and thirty-nine years and several epidemics later, it’s salvation through injection being offered at churches throughout Mobile. In a suffocating atmosphere of distrust, public health officials need to tap into faith, wherever they find it. “Any time you’re going and doing something unknown, a house of worship is certainly a place of calm,” Davis, the nurse and vaccinator, told me. “It’s a place they know and are comfortable.”
Meanwhile, beyond sanctuary, a soulish war between blind faith and grim hopelessness seemed to rage within Mobile’s vaccinated minority. Plenty of ink and pixels have been invested in their unvaccinated counterparts, and the myriad reasons—political, personal, or otherwise—for their abstention. But what, I wondered, about people living in red America who have embraced immunity? In the national battle over vaccination, their voices have largely been drowned out. Perhaps that gave them even more to say. I set out to listen—to find out what being marginalized for being vaccinated does to a person’s sense of safety, belonging, and community. They may be, statistically speaking, more sheltered from death by Covid-19, but would they ever recover from a total loss of faith in humanity? For those who have maintained compassion for vaccine holdouts or refusers, it is a mounting struggle to keep loving the neighbors who endanger by abstaining from our best tool to save ourselves. By delaying or refusing to get vaccinated against Covid-19, a majority of Alabamians have offered up their bodies to host the virus, spread its disease, and incubate its next, potentially more dangerous variant. It is a biblical question—“Am I my brother’s keeper?”—that leaves Mobile’s vaccinated sleepless by night and dread-filled by day.
“There’s a hardening of hearts,” Pastor Jim Mather told me in the mint green living room of the home where he and his wife, Mary, run Friends of Internationals, a Christian ministry focused on international students at the University of South Alabama and the rest of the international community in Mobile. The pandemic has become more than a public health emergency. “It is a spiritual crisis,” Mather said. “We are being revealed.” It had been a shock for many to realize that mercy is not infinite, it can be drained, that there may be a hard edge to grace, and it can be reached. It was a greater shock to realize that the survival of so many in Mobile would depend on their whittled-down patience and worn-thin compassion. How else, but with open arms and hearts, could they welcome the unvaccinated majority into their outnumbered ranks? How else could they draw another soul into the sanctity of herd immunity?
“You’re tempted to be so frustrated. It breaks your heart. Like, man, this is preventable,” said Dr. Tiffani Maycock, a family doctor and vaccine hesitancy researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “In the back of your mind, you know they chose not to get a vaccine. It takes a lot of discipline to not entertain that thought. I have to force myself to be empathetic.” She is not alone. Dr. Nina Ford Johnson—a pediatrician, president of the Medical Society of Mobile County, and wife of a pastor who works at a funeral home—faces Covid-19, one way or another, every day. To her dismay, many of her patients remain unvaccinated. “Maybe they don’t believe what I do or what I’m saying,” she told me. “It’s been a challenge. I do ask God, ‘Why are we going through this?’”
Even spiritual leaders have grown weary. “I have to watch myself. My patience is wearing thin,” said the Reverend Jim Flowers, All Saints pastor. “I just don’t understand it. I’m convinced there’s a segment of our population that would rather die than get vaccinated.”
There is much, much more and it’s heartbreaking. These are all people trying to find some compassion in their hearts for people who just don’t give a damn and are happy to see people die solely out of stubbornness and radical politics. It’s just … infuriating.
I feel for the people who are trying to do the work of getting these people vaccinated so they can keep the community safe. What an utter horror this must be.