Latest reports reveal that: Wyoming, Idaho, Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia have vaccinated less than 40% of their populations against COVID19, and that Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Arkansas are left with less than 10% capacity in their Intensive Care Units, the vast majority of the sufferers in ICUs coming from the ranks of the unvaccinated. 

Wyoming’s population is about 570,000, and Idaho’s is 1.87 million. If they have less that 40% vaccinated, they are maybe not trying very hard. However they do face stiff challenges. Wyoming and Idaho are among the western states that are badly infected by the Wild-West, mountain-man, cowboy, 7th-Cavalry fantasy lives of professedly rugged individualists who get their money from land belonging to the Federal Government. No city-slickers are going to tell them what to do!

But the other constellation of states is also of interest. Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Arkansas are all former Confederate states, and many Northerners who’ve migrated South to these sunbelt states become Good Old Rebels in no time at all. These states are weak on civil rights, weak in education, strongly anti-labor, crowded with evangelicals, largely anti-science, enthusiastically creationist, and the homes of many zealots in the Trump base. Do their shared history and these shared traits have anything to do with their contemptible record in the fight against COVID19?