[Gratefully, not all Republicans are against common sense and science. And leave politics where it belongs. Hospitals also demand the vaccine, and those who have refused to take it, for religious or other reasons, have faced the same consequences as the Military, or any other place where there are too many people dealing with too many people. Safety first. ]
Republican lawmaker's pro-vaccine messages are part of an effort to 'get the politics out of the vaccination process'
A new campaign in mostly unvaccinated Shawano County seeks to persuade residents to get vaccinated against COVID-19
Just outside of Shawano, a billboard advertises the COVID-19 vaccine.
"I got the vaccine so I can protect myself and all the people I care about," it reads, alongside a photo of state Assembly Rep. Gary Tauchen, of Hartland.
Tauchen is a Republican, and his district is a conservative area. And like other rural parts of the state, uptake of the vaccine has been slow. Only 42 percent of Shawano County residents are fully vaccinated, according to
state data, making it the county with the fifth-lowest vaccination rate in Wisconsin.
Tauchen, who is part of a coalition of leaders called the Community Health Action Team that is behind the new public messaging campaign, wants to see that change.
"I'm a farm boy by trade," Tauchen said. "We don't vaccinate part of our herd, we vaccinate the whole herd. And I think it's important to get as many people vaccinated as you can."
Tauchen is one of a relatively small number of elected Republican leaders in Wisconsin who've been willing to be a part of campaigns to publicly encourage vaccinations. GOP leaders like U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson have spent months
promoting false or misleading information about the vaccine. In August, state Senate Majority Leader Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, encouraged hospital workers to
defy their employers' vaccine mandates.
Public health leaders say the politicization of the vaccine campaign has had deadly results.
Consistently for the last year Republicans have been more likely than Democrats or independents to
tell opinion surveys they are
skeptical of the vaccine. A study published in April found that unlike other groups, self-identified Republicans
became more skeptical of the vaccine over time.
By October, the death rate from COVID-19 in rural areas was
double what it was in urban regions of the Unites States, according to an
analysis from the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Relatively low vaccination rates in rural areas were at least part of the explanation, according to the report. In Wisconsin, the
latest data show that in September unvaccinated people were five times more likely than fully vaccinated people to be infected with COVID-19, nine times more likely to be hospitalized and 19 times more likely to die.
That's why the Community Health Action Team, which is organized by the health system ThedaCare, launched the new campaign using grant money from the state Department of Health Services. In addition to the billboards, it includes a series of radio ads in which a Shawano parent and a school board member urge vaccinations as a way to keep schools open; and a doctor describes overloaded conditions at the local hospital.
(full article online)
A new campaign encouraging COVID-19 vaccinations in rural Shawano County has a conservative Republican lawmaker as a spokesperson. It's an attempt to 'get the politics out of the vaccination process,' a hospital leader said.
www.wpr.org
