Missouri Gov. Michael Parson said, “The formula is the same wherever it is, it's based on the population where you're at. So there's nobody in rural Missouri getting vaccinated any more than any of the urban areas.”
That was absolutely not true. Had Parson’s deadly, indefensible lies come right from theTrump pandemic playbook? They felt eerily familiar.
Deloitte Consulting reported that the city of St. Louis is a vaccine desert: “According to the analysis, 30.4 percent of people who've received the vaccine in Missouri got it in a county other than the one in which they live.”
Last week 450 qualified people were turned away from a vaccination site in St. Louis. All of them had registered and every one of them had an appointment. An “error” in Missouri’s state of the art computer system excluded all of them.
The small Missouri towns massively overstocked with vaccines are overwhelmingly white. They voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and for Parson in 2020. The Cities of St. Louis and Kansas City have large black populations which historically have not supported Republican politicians. Missouri’s Governor Mike Parson is a Republican from Bolivar, a rural area where he owns a hog farm.
When Governor Parson did not mandate the wearing of masks in Missouri it seems that his rural constituents gave him a thumbs up. His Republican farmer voters in southern and western counties weren’t wearing masks anyway as we witnessed several times in visits to outlying counties. Those people have since become infected, seriously ill, and now dying in greater numbers than city residents who are taking the precautions recommended by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
So did Parson panic and deluge the country towns with vaccines? Did he make this decision based on advice from medical researchers?
Missouri is home to Washington University, a nationally ranked research institution that has produced 18 Nobel Laureates in Medicine/Physiology. In 2020 Parson held a photo op with Wash U medical school leaders about covid testing. But in 2021 did Parson approach the University’s Institute for Public Health about how to roll out the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines? Did he ask for professional guidance on where the vaccine should be distributed first? He should have. Did he call?
Fact: Governor Parson never went to college. Could he have been intimidated by the thought of asking for advice from M.D./Ph.D.’s at Washington University? A photo op is easy. Admitting you don’t know what to do next is hard.
Is his state health director Dr. Randall Williams, an obstetrician/gynecologist, qualified to decide where vaccines should go? Is Williams a non-partisan public health expert whose only interest is keeping Missourians healthy?
In 2019 Williams supported Parson’s decision to shut down abortion clinics across the state, a common position taken by conservative Republicans. In sworn testimony, Williams admitted that he was using state funds to track the menstrual cycles of women who had accessed the services of the remaining Missouri abortion clinic he was determined to close. Williams was said to have deliberately instituted traumatizing impediments to women seeking abortion days before their procedures.
Doctor Jennifer Villavicencio, a fellow with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said the practice of state surveillance of abortion clinic patients, "defies both logic and ethics." She called the intrusion, "skin-crawling" She said, "From an ethical standpoint, it’s frankly bonkers."
New York University Bioethicist Arthur Caplan remarked, comparing Missouri's government to China, "When a government official monitors your reproductive behavior, you are perilously close to replicating totalitarian regimes."
So if Dr. Williams believes that closing abortion clinics showed his loyalty to Republican political leaders, could we assume that Williams was diverting covid vaccines away from black urban citizens and rewarding rural conservative voters?
Williams said the vaccination problems are not as bad as they look because the vaccine providers aren’t recording them fast enough. Again, more Trump playbook content.
Recently reported data from the Centers for Disease Control show Missouri has vaccinated a smaller proportion of its population than almost any other state in the nation.
Should a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate Parson’s and Williams’s decisions to put the health of St. Louis and Kansas City citizens at risk for very serious pandemic infections that can and have been fatal?
Tony Messenger, St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
“So it has been in the pandemic under the leadership of Parson and his health director, Dr. Randall Williams. No mask mandates. Few statewide directives at all. Deadly outbreaks in state veterans homes and prisons. A massive split between urban and rural areas in terms of efforts to control the pandemic. And now, the slow, skewed vaccine rollout that is causing people in the state’s two biggest cities to drive hundreds of miles to make sure precious vials of vaccines don’t end up in the trash.”