People were gossiping about who had it and where they got it and whether there was someone in town who knew they had it but refused to isolate.
“I had both shots of the vaccine, and people just acted like, ‘Oh, it doesn’t help,'” Cheryl Wetton said. “It bothers me sometimes that people act like Covid is a big joke. I always want to say, ‘Well, why don’t you just come right up here to the cemetery, and I’ll show you my husband’s grave? And I can show you it’s no joke.'”
Wetton actually did say that to a guy in town, she later confirmed. “He just got real quiet.”
“If you have it, everybody knows it. And they’re talking about you,” Tara Chitwood said. She was working behind the register at a souvenir shop, subbing in for her mom, who’d gotten sick a few days earlier. It was “more than likely” Covid-19, Chitwood said, because one of her mom’s friends tested positive. But her mom probably wouldn’t get tested, she said.
The latest wave is the worst one yet
When we called Cricket Kester, the phone had a bad connection, and she couldn’t hear us: “If this is family, call back. Otherwise we’re too sick to talk to anybody.”
We did call back, and Kester said she was glad. She and her husband were both vaccinated this spring and got breakthrough infections. She thought they’d be dead without the vaccine, and told us to put the word out that everyone should get it.
The coffee shop we’d filmed at in 2020 had just closed for two weeks, and everyone we talked to in town had heard people who worked there had gotten sick. The health center said the rumor had pushed a wave of people to get tested for Covid-19. Some in town knew the owners personally and were worried about them, but the owners did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. Most people we spoke to knew exactly the last time they’d eaten there.
Delta variant fuels the death toll — and the anxiety
That means a lot of jobs are in the service industry, and few people can work from home.
“They want to hide the fact that they’re sick so they can work,” Debbie Turley said. “You don’t get vaccinated. You don’t get tested. You hide your symptoms if you’re able to. And you just go out in the community and spread the virus.”
Turley already had Covid-19, and she was vaccinated, and she wore masks, too. “I was actually exposed this week by someone who didn’t know they had it, but they did have a cough, and they didn’t stay home,” she said. She’d also been in the coffee shop a few times not long before it closed.
Rodebush’s wife Ruth fought cancer for 12 years, he said. Covid-19 killed her in eight days. She died July 20, 2021. “I talked to her up until the Sunday before she died,” Rodebush said. “She said, ‘This is bad, I think you all need to get the shot.’ And I think she’s right.”
When Ruth was dying, the hospital called at about 2:30 a.m., so Rodebush and his son went to see her. The Covid-19 ward was eerie — dark, everyone in protective gear, the patients on ventilators, which he knew was the end of the line. “There’s nothing good about it,” he said. “I don’t ever want to go back in one.”
They’d watched our 2020 story for CNN, and he thought it was “bullsh*t.” He knew everyone in the video — every single one of them. At the time, he thought they were wrong about masks, but now it was more visceral. “Those boys sitting in the coffee shop don’t know what they’re talking about when they’re talking about Covid. They need to walk through the Covid ward. That’ll change your mind. Just stay a day there. See how you like it. It’s a different story then.”
Too ‘bullheaded’ to take the vaccine
This is not a place that gets a lot of national news coverage. And it’s hard to break into socially. People take care of each other in times of joy and crisis, but newcomers could be there 10 years without really fitting in, Rodebush said.
This meant just about everyone had seen our last story. Rodebush wanted us to talk about it with his buddy, Wayland Bland. He called him, and after a little convincing, Bland zoomed into the driveway in his pickup and called out to us to film the blue bandana on his face. He wanted us to film him saying, “I’m a Republican, and I’m wearing this mask.”
Last fall, Bland spent seven days in the hospital with Covid-19. He’d had a kidney transplant, and knew he was high-risk. Last year, Rodebush said, “Me and him and Ruth sat here and talked about it, and they both said, ‘If we get it, we’ll die from it.'” But Bland lived.
“What’d you tell ’em, that I’m the toughest bastard there ever was?” Bland said. It was exactly what his friend had said.
“I was on everything they had — steroids, full drip, plasma from people that’d had Covid, drugs that they gave my President, (Donald) Trump. And they finally burned it out of me,” Bland said. But he would not get the vaccine.
“They shafted my President,” Bland said. He thought the vaccine was delayed intentionally to hurt Trump, a baseless claim. “They wouldn’t give it to him because they know damn good and well he’d be reelected, and there’d be nothing nobody could do. So, they had to swindle around and scheme around and keep it from him, and just as soon as the election was over, Bam! There we got it.”
“I’m so bullheaded. You shafted me out of my President. I ain’t taking your medicine,” he said. “I’ll take what they gave him, but I’m not taking yours.”
Vaccine doubts fester among those who feel ‘lost,’ a doctor says
Public health officials need to understand the culture here, said Dr. Chris Cochran, an internist at a hospital just over an hour away in West Plains. There are no hospitals in Carter County, and West Plains is one of the places people drive to for health care. Cochran was raised in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas, with a population of about 1,000, and he doesn’t really have a first name there anymore, he said. People just call him “Doc.”
“I don’t want to ever give anybody an excuse for doing something like not getting vaccinated. But the reasons do harken to someone who has been told that they’re a dumb hillbilly all their life by the rest of the country,” Cochran said. “I don’t know that we are oppressed or disenfranchised. And I don’t know if we deserve to even feel that way here. But we are a flyover state. … We are a people who consider ourselves lost to the rest of the world.”
We heard that a lot — that the news media called people dumb hillbillies. But we didn’t say that, and our bosses at CNN didn’t either, or our friends back in New York. Even so, people here still feel singled out, treated like a population separate from the rest of the country, Cochran said.
Vaccines are offered in secret as peer pressure gnaws
“It’s a real, severe, heavy peer pressure in their church, in their family, in their friend group, in their Facebook friend group, whatever,” Cochran said. “People are so pressured not to get vaccinated by their by their group that it is, to them, somewhat of a treasonous act.”
“When I tell people that are having trouble admitting that they were wrong about the vaccine and the disease, I preface it with, ‘I was wrong, too,'” Cochran said. At the beginning of the pandemic, he knew Covid-19 was serious, but he underestimated its power to spread.
In spring of 2020, a woman stopped him in the grocery store parking lot. “She said, ‘Doc, what do you think about this Covid thing? Do you think it’s going to make it to us?’ And I said, ‘Ma’am, I really don’t think it’s going to make it here, just like a lot of things, it burns out before it ever makes it to the middle of nowhere like us.'” She said she was glad to hear that.
“Well, about six months later, her mother died of Covid,” Cochran said. “It wasn’t my fault that she died of Covid, but I can’t forgive myself for what I said to that woman. And so it’s my job now to move on and make sure that I help as many people as I can that are having trouble coping with and coming to grips with the fact that we’ve all got this wrong to some degree.”
One man finally fesses up about his own vaccine choice
And it’s hard for people to change their minds in a place with no anonymity.
It had been a little bit weird for Keathley after our October 2020 interview. People stopped him as far away as Branson and asked if he was the guy in the CNN video. Some said it was awesome, he said. One lady yelled at him because her friends had died of Covid-19.
And people watched him closely. Chitwood said Keathley came into the souvenir shop all the time. She quoted his line about Democrats being the only ones who wore masks. “I’ve seen him at a game with one on,” she said. “I was like, hahaha.” Word spread quickly when he got Covid-19.
On our second night in town in August, we joined Keathley at the Mexican restaurant and heard later that after we left, he’d told the whole restaurant we were journalists with CNN and he wasn’t going to talk to us on camera this time. When we ran into him a second time at a diner, it seemed like fate.
He was getting breakfast with Aly Morris, his 16-year-old niece. Morris said random people would shout from across the room that they recognized Keathley from TV. She thought it was cool.
Aly didn’t like wearing a mask, and she thought her teachers had been harsh about it. But she got the vaccine, she said. Aly wants to be a doctor, and she couldn’t imagine telling patients to get a vaccine when she hadn’t herself.
Keathley watched as Aly talked. He said he didn’t want to talk on camera. But he relented.
He’d been pretty cavalier in 2020. “I guess if I get it and it kills me, then it’s slow walking and sad singing for the family,” Keathley said then. What would he want on his tombstone? “Didn’t wear a mask.”
But did he get the vaccine? Keathley sat with his arms crossed and made a face.
Our CNN crew was not above pleading. “Please, Brian, did you get the vaccine?”
“Whether or not I got the vaccine should not dissuade someone else from getting it. If they feel they need it, then they need to get it.”
People feel like they have to get the vaccine in secret, we told Keathley. He’s a big, tough guy, works on the railroad, has big mouth — and everyone knows it. Maybe it would mean something, even to one person, coming from him.
“Corona doesn’t care who you are,” he said. “Whether you think you’re a big, tough guy or whether you’re — anything — it doesn’t matter. If you get it, it can kill you.”
People have to decide whether they wanted to be in a hospital bed and be told they’re going to be put on a ventilator and might never wake up, he said. And hear that their family could never say goodbye. He’d thought about it: “I don’t want my wife to have to wonder … is he going to come back out?”
“That’s why I got a vaccine,” Keathley said.