Politics – Not Faith – Main Driver of Vaccine Hesitancy

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) seems pretty certain that partisanship isn't playing a role in his state's bottom-tier vaccination rates. In April, for example, he suggested that the problem wasn't a function of Republican resistance but, instead, of Mississippi having "a very large African American population" and "a lot of rural people." Each of those claims is dubious for different reasons, but we'll come back to that.