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As the state hits a milestone with 1 million Mainers having received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, significant divisions remain between the state’s southern coast and its rural interior.
In Cumberland County, nearly 90% of those eligible had received at least one injection on Tuesday, by far the highest rate of Maine’s 16 counties. Somerset County, on the other hand, has the lowest rate: only 64 percent of eligible residents received at least one dose, well below rates statewide and in the United States.
While residents have long spoken of “two Maines” and the long-standing divisions in a state of nearly 500 municipalities, those divisions have apparently never been so prevalent as Maine grapples with its worst crisis. state sanitary facilities for a century.
Residents of Somerset County were virtually unanimous that opposition to being told what to do, especially by the government, played a significant role in the desire not to get the vaccine.
“People have strong heads,” said Glenn Murray, 60 of Norridgewock, who is vaccinated.
But 90 miles south, reluctance to vaccinate was virtually non-existent. Jill Carlton, 27, of Portland, who was walking her roommate’s dog on Congress Street, said she didn’t know anyone who wasn’t vaccinated. Although some took longer to get the vaccine than others, she said.
Carlton said she had been vaccinated “for me and for others, to stop the spread”.
Lisa Caswell, director of pharmacy at Redington-Fairview General Hospital in Skowhegan, was not surprised that Somerset ranks last in immunization.
While Caswell said many demanded to be vaccinated in early spring, that rate has since slowed precipitously. Many have cited misinformation about potential side effects. She also said it was clear that the political nature of vaccines had moved some away from them.
Skowhegan hospital had made a lot of public messages around the vaccine and had even visited around 100 homes to vaccinate people, as well as several pop-up clinics, Caswell said.
Yet 16,214 eligible county residents did not receive a single injection. Many unvaccinated people are young, she said. In Somerset County, 12-49 year olds have a vaccination rate of just 50 percent, which represents the majority of the county’s unvaccinated population. In Cumberland County, this rate is 83 percent.
Many of these people are receiving medical exams or other types of medical care in hospital, Caswell said. Vaccination at those appointments at the insistence of a doctor was clearly the best way to achieve a higher vaccination rate in the county, she said.
“People who can be convinced by widely disseminated public messages have already been convinced,” Caswell said. “I think it’s the one-on-one conversations that are really going to make the difference now.”
A Bangor Daily News analysis of Penobscot County in June found that a city’s level of support for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election was the best indicator of a low vaccination rate. This correlation also holds when looking at county-wide vaccination rates and Trump’s backing. About 60% in Somerset County voted for Trump, the second highest rate in Maine after Piscataquis, while about 30% did so in Cumberland.
Randy Libby, 32, who has a “Trump 2024” sticker on the front of his car, noted that Trump had been vaccinated and encouraged others to get vaccinated.
But Libby, who was interviewed outside her workplace in Skowhegan, did not get the shot. He believes that there has not been enough testing of the vaccines available. He noted that he had made it through the duration of the pandemic without contracting the virus.
“I usually keep my distance, I wash my hands,” Libby said. “Not much else has changed: just living life. ”
Calling vaccine disparities in Maine “terrible,” Joe Watson, 77, of Portland, said political differences appeared to be the most important factor in individual decisions of the unvaccinated.
Trump had not done enough to encourage his supporters to get vaccinated, he said. The former president opted to receive the vaccine privately as president, making him the only living or former president not to be filmed.
“I think it resonated with people,” Watson said, “even though he was vaccinated himself,”
Greg Dore, 66, of Skowhegan, said the mentality in southern Maine is fundamentally different from the rest of the state.
“People south of Augusta have a different attitude than those to the north,” Dore said.
Dore, who recently retired from his longtime role as Skowhegan’s roads commissioner, is vaccinated but said none of her five sons wanted to be vaccinated. He thinks the reluctance to get vaccinated really comes down to education.
David Ellis, 62, who lives in Augusta but operates a pottery business in the town of Mercer, Somerset County, said he felt the different vaccination rates reflected existing divisions in the state, not a new one.
“I think it’s a division by choice,” said Ellis, who said it was an obvious decision for him to get the shot. “People make a decision. They’re going to draw a line in the sand, and that’s where it is.
Some Mainers, including Larry McHugh, 66, from Anson and Joe Bennett, 49, from Saco, said it just made more sense to get the shot in Cumberland County vs Somerset, noting that it was more densely populated and could see much further. of conditions that could bring the virus.
Population density is one of the many important divisions between the two counties. Cumberland is 28 times more densely populated than Somerset, has a median household income $ 32,000 higher and a poverty rate almost three times lower.
Yet the strongest divide between the two counties may be in college education. More than half of people 25 and over in Cumberland have a college degree, while only 17 percent in Somerset. A lot of data has shown that people with a university degree are much more likely to get the vaccine.
Alexis Toth, 27, of Madison, who was shopping at the Walmart in Skowhegan on Tuesday, did not want to get the shot but did so so he could continue working in the medical field. It upset her to have to be vaccinated, which she did not want.
Toth herself wants this to be an individual decision and not involving terms like Gov. Janet Mills or President Joe Biden, she said.
“If I didn’t get the hang of it, I was going to lose my job,” Toth said.
A 24-year-old woman from Smithfield who also worked in the medical field had similar feelings. She did not want to be vaccinated because she was pregnant. Fears about fertility are the most common reason for vaccine hesitancy seen by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Director Nirav Shah said last week.
But the woman, who said opposition to vaccines in Somerset County likely stemmed from a lack of education and opposition to being told what to do, said she had realized after talking to healthcare professionals that there was no evidence the vaccine could hurt her or her baby.
“Getting COVID may be more damaging to me and my baby than getting the vaccine,” said the woman, who requested anonymity to avoid negative reactions. “There are unknown risks, but, from what I’ve read and studied, it’s pretty safe.”
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