When the Center Does Not Hold
Late this August, as a red sun descended in the smokey sky above Grants Pass, an hour’s drive to my north, more than 50 citizens in lawn chairs gathered outside the county courthouse. Under the headline “COVID Outbreaks in Southern Oregon Among the National’s Worst” local reporter Savannah Eadens recounted:
To start the county commissioners’ public meeting, the group — mostly un-masked constituents and some of their children — stood proudly for the American flag and recited the Pledge of Allegiance with their hands over their hearts.
For the next 90 minutes Wednesday, locals lined up at a podium for a three-minute window to share with the county’s three commissioners their thoughts about COVID-19.
A mother said she’s considering moving her family out of the community if Gov. Kate Brown’s statewide mask mandate is enforced, One woman claimed the coronavirus was created in order to force experimental vaccines on the public. Another called the vaccine a ‘kill shot.’
Some in the group cheered.
When it was the commissioners’ turn to respond, Herman Baertschiger, a former Republican state senator said: ‘COVID is real, I don’t think there is anyone who thinks it’s not’ — even though that’s exactly what some in the crowd had just publicly proclaimed, including a man wearing a shirt with the words ‘no muzzle, no vaccine, no fear, don’t comply, defy.’
Three days later and closer to home, hundreds of protestors assembled outside the Asante Regional Medical Center in Medford, with signs opposing mask and vaccine mandates. Inside, COVID cases filled the ICU. A video of the demonstration went viral and grabbed national headlines. Firing back, Oregon’s Governor Kate Brown called in the Oregon National Guard to provide support to the beleaguered medical staff.
In rural Eastern Oregon, largely bypassed by the first COVID wave but now home to some of the highest COVID rates in the country, anti-vaccination sentiments don’t raise signs, but run deep.
A doctor in Harney County, where cattle outnumber people 14-to-1, said he was hesitant to recommend the vaccine to patients, instead encouraging them to “read both sides (if there are two) and make a decision.” Politicians representing these eastern counties wager that requiring vaccines will not lead to more shots in arms but more distrust from Oregonians who are already skeptical of government mandates. A resident of a mountainous city on the Columbia River plateau, explained to CNN: “People [here] don’t like to be told what they have to do when we have our lives and our livelihoods and families to take care of. Individual freedom, that’s our credo.”
Recently, a staff member at a school east of Portland was placed on administrative leave for wearing blackface to protest a district policy that required unvaccinated staff to socially distance. She explained:
On Friday, September 17, I showed up to school, and I put on some dark makeup on the parts that were showing my skin, including my hands. I came in hopes to represent Rosa Parks, who I admire for standing up during her time when segregation was taking place. I felt like I and others who are unvaccinated, we’re starting to experience segregation.
A state divided
Segregation no, division yes. Oregon’s record-breaking summer COVID surge exposed the same fault lines that have always divided the state—between the cities along Interstate 5 and the smaller towns and rural communities to the east. Predictably, vaccination rates have mirrored Democratic and Republican party lines. As of mid-September, while nearly 71 percent of adults living in counties that swung Biden in 2020 were at least partially vaccinated, the vaccination rate in Trump counties had yet to exceed 40 percent. Like elsewhere in the country, the counties with exploding COVID cases this summer were largely red.
But political affiliations tell only part of the story. More telling is the resentment in Oregon’s rural communities that cities receive more than their fair share of resources and look down on rural people; the chasm between the lives of professional and technical workers in office buildings and farmers and cattle ranchers working the land; the clashes between far-right groups like the Proud Boys and demonstrators carrying George Floyd posters; the pressure for social conformity in rural places and acceptance of unconventional behavior in cities; the tension between individualism (a.k.a. “freedom”) and social responsibility which knows no geography—and much more.
An anti-vaccine history
Wrangling over vaccines, however, turns out to be an Oregon tradition. A century ago, a group of women in Portland, calling themself the Public School Protective League, applied their new voting rights to oppose compulsory vaccination. They were emboldened by a firebrand named Lora Little.
Originally from Minnesota, Little saw vaccines as “an artificial pollution of the blood.” In 1896, her son died of diphtheria, which she blamed on the smallpox vaccine. Two decades later, she started the Little School of Health in a prominent Portland neighborhood. There she offered lectures in right living and tirades against drugs, doctors, and the behemoth she called the “state-sponsored vaccination complex” (Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon, 2003).
At the time, the scourges of Spanish Flu and smallpox had intensified in the Pacific Northwest. The latter was preventable, the target of the world’s first effective vaccine. In Oregon, records show that there were 122 reported cases of smallpox in 1917, and 2,626 in 1919. In Washington state, over the same time span, smallpox leaped from 390 to 4,369 reported cases, a figure one state health official called “inexcusable,” given the availability of vaccines (Crosscut, May 21, 2020).
Without vaccination mandates, local health officials did what they could. In Portland, they slapped warnings on the front doors of victims, sent the sickest to a “pesthouse,” and urged vaccinations for longshoremen at the city’s port, a viral point of entry.
Meanwhile, Little claimed smallpox was “life-saving” because it rid the body of “an excess of waste matter.” The Morning Oregonian was dismissive, calling Little and her supporters “crazy” and “misguided.” But that year, when the city tried to exclude unvaccinated schoolchildren, Little led a protest that shut the schools down instead.
One hundred years later, Oregon remains an anti-vaccine epicenter. A recent study found that Oregon ranked in the bottom third of U.S. states for children who had received their measles, mumps, and rubella immunizations (or MMR, as it is commonly known).
Bringing it home
Last week, I was stunned to find a headline in my Nextdoor neighbor thread from two local high school students: “Student Vaccine Mandate for Ashland School District.” There was a link to a petition the students, co-presidents at Ashland High School, had just placed on change.org that asked the Ashland school board to require COVID vaccinations for all eligible students—as it had for staff months earlier. The students, Joshua Datz and Luke Seeley, were inspired by recent decisions in the country’s largest school districts, New York City and Los Angeles, to require eligible students (12 and older) to be vaccinated.
A few days earlier, Joshua and Luke had taken their proposition to the Ashland school board, where it received a lukewarm response. Even if the board supported the proposal, did they have the power to do it, members wondered. (They did.)
For Joshua and Luke, the reasoning was simple: COVID cases in the Rogue Valley were continuing to spike and vaccinations remained the strongest form of protection against the virus. “Requiring vaccinations should be a matter of public health, not private choice,” said Joshua in a public radio interview. “It signals community, where everyone comes together to care for each other.”
Within three days after posting their petition, it had gathered over 800 signatures. Some signers also donated money to expand the campaign.
Still, as the students knew well, vaccine resistance has strong roots in Ashland, though you won’t find t-shirts saying, “no muzzle, no vaccine, no fear, don’t comply.”
“You have these extreme beliefs on the left and right, plus those who don’t believe in Western medicine,” Luke says. “Building understanding for the science behind the vaccine is the hardest part.” (Homeopathic medicine, massage, and acupuncture are the go-to healers for many here.)
Joshua and Luke closed their radio interview with a wish for the ages. “COVID is just one of many challenges we face as a society, a democracy, today,” says Joshua. “We need civil conversations that are productive, that help us find clarity complex issues.”
When the center does not hold
The top headline on today’s New York Times (Oct. 1, 2021) reads, “U.S. Covid Death Toll Surpasses 700,000 Despite Wide Availability of Vaccines.” It is a milestone that few experts had anticipated months ago when vaccines became widely available, the article continues, and an overwhelming majority of Americans who have died in recent months were unvaccinated. The coronavirus pandemic has now become the deadliest in American history.
On our cross-country drive this August from Oregon to New York, Tony and I traversed an intricate patchwork of COVID practices. In West Yellowstone, the tourist gateway to Yellowstone National Park, the streets and restaurants were packed with visitors without a mask in sight. Four miles to the east, at the park entrance, the federal government took over: “Consistent with CDC guidance, visitors to Yellowstone are required to wear a mask indoors and in crowded outdoor spaces, regardless of vaccination status or community transmission levels.”
At a gas station outside Omaha, no one standing in line at the Fast Break convenience store wore masks. At the Starbucks in downtown Omaha, no mask meant no entry. In Chicago, proof of vaccination was required for indoor dining. In the small, Pennsylvania coal-mining town where we spent the night on the last leg of our trip, there didn’t seem to be any rules. When I grabbed an early morning coffee in Brooklyn two days later, the first and only customer, the barista asked to see my vaccination card when I took a seat.
Back in Oregon, East Oregon counties recently declared a state of emergency in response to Governor Kate Brown’s mandate that certain workers, including health care staff, must be vaccinated by October 18 or lose their job. Strained with the recent surge of (unvaccinated) delta patients in hospitals, officials in six counties said the mandate would compound existing staff shortages, since a significant portion of staff would quit rather “take the shot.”
I am reminded yet again of W.B. Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
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