Above, Emily Herrera poses outside her office at the Cochran Memorial Hospital in Morton, Texas, a city located in West Texas where vaccine rates have suddenly dropped.
Healthcare workers in West Texas were driving over 800 miles round trip to get vaccines in Austin to distribute to those in rural areas. Many people were signing up to get vaccinated and then in April the calls stopped coming. This was around the time Biden missed his goal of 70% of Americans being vaccinated. There's not clear cut reason as to why people stopped getting vaccinated, however there are some factors that give some insight.
According to Brooks (2021), people who make less money are less likely to get vaccinated, and people of color are also less likely to get vaccinated. A lot of this has to do with less resources being available to people in poverty and people of color. Time is also a factor: not many people have the time, when working between multiple jobs or having to commute to vaccination sights.
There's also the groups of people that either think the pandemic is a hoax, or that the vaccine was made too fast. Regardless, Texas' partial vaccine population is below the average, 53.7% versus the national 65.7%.
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