National Review
Arkansas Governor: Trump’s advocates’ vaccine hesitation stems from ‘natural resistance to government’
Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, said on Sunday that the vaccine’s hesitation among former President Trump’s supporters is the result of “natural resistance to the government,” calling the reluctance to get the vaccine “worrying.” . At CNN’s State of the Union, host Dana Bash asked Hutchinson what he believes is causing the hesitation seen among Trump voters, noting that half of the 45th president’s supporters said they do not plan to get a coronavirus vaccine. “Well, I thought about it a lot and I think it’s a natural resistance to the government and skepticism about it,” said Hutchinson. “But you look at the breadth of support here in Arkansas for President Trump, and you have rural voters, you have minority voters and your hesitation is worrying, not just here, but across the country.” “And I hope, as a country, we will get the vaccination rate of 50% of the population, but we will have a more difficult time going from 50% to 70% and it is about overcoming skepticism,” he added. . However, as Jim Geraghty of the National Review noted earlier this week, although a recent NPR / PBS NewsHour / Marist poll showed that almost half of Republican men said they would not choose to be vaccinated if a vaccine were made available to them, that same survey it also showed that 24% of all Republicans who identified themselves and 20% of all Republican men who identified themselves had already received the vaccine. “Self-identified Republican men accounted for 13% of the sample,” writes Geraghty. “So if a little less than half of that demographic group actually refuses the vaccine when offered, we are looking at 6 to 7 percent of the adult population in general.” Asked whether Trump should be more proactive in encouraging his supporters to receive the vaccine, Hutchinson said he was “delighted” that the president recently indicated that his supporters should receive the vaccine. Although Trump did not participate in a public service announcement with other former U.S. presidents that encouraged Americans to get vaccinated, Trump supported vaccination in an interview last week. “I don’t know the story behind why he wasn’t at PSA with the other presidents,” said Hutchinson. “Any message is useful and I think we have to have our leaders, we have to have sports figures, we have to have different representatives from our community, including our political leaders, they say [the] the vaccine is important. ”Hutchinson also reiterated his plans to suspend his state’s mask mandate until the end of March. He defended the decision for Bash, who asked why the mandate would be terminated in the light of evidence that showed the effectiveness of wearing a mask to mitigate the spread of the virus. “We’ve been at this for a year and we know a lot more today than we did a year ago,” he said. “And so we had to educate people to understand the importance of the mask and I hope that, even though we take the mandate out of the mask, people will continue to wear the mask when you cannot safely distance yourself.”