Data shows COVID vaccination rate lower in some GOP-held congressional districts, more support urged

Updated at 1 p.m. Saturday with new remarks by U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert raising questions about vaccines.

WASHINGTON — Vaccines are the best way to smother the COVID-19 pandemic and keep Texans out of hospitals and morgues.

Yet despite cajoling from public health officials, NBA players and movie stars, just about 56% of eligible Texans are fully vaccinated.

Of 36 congressional districts in Texas, Republicans control 23, including those with the best and worst vaccination rates in the state, ranging from 60% in Rep. Van Taylor’s Plano-based district to just under 33% in the East Texas district represented by Rep. Louie Gohmert of Tyler and a Panhandle district represented by Rep. Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician.

Although Republicans hold five of the top 12 districts in terms of vaccination rates, according to an analysis from Harvard University researchers, they also hold all 12 of Texas’ worst. In many of those, the local congressmen have refused to say if they’ve been vaccinated. And many have told constituents it’s OK to decide against getting the shot, affirming their demands for personal freedom.

Taylor frequently posts about vaccination outreach and encourages constituents to sign up for a shot. Gohmert, on the other hand, has been tight-lipped about his own vaccination status, instead bashing guidance on masking from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and hosting forums with anti-vaccine doctors. He again raised reservations about vaccines in a Friday night speech at the Texas Youth Summit conservative gathering, saying, “the pandemic is under more control, we need to get back to our freedom of saying, ‘Look, here’s my preexisting conditions, let’s talk about which one I should take, if I should even take one.’” He drew applause in the speech when he touted the potential for human use of the livestock dewormer ivermectin to help treat COVID-19 — a practice federal health officials have warned against.

Jackson readily says that he’s vaccinated and has encouraged others to consider getting vaccinated, too. But he’s as vocal as any Republican pressing personal choice and downplaying the potential seriousness of the virus.

There’s no way to know for sure whether their skepticism has suppressed vaccine rates in Gohmert’s 12-county 1st District, or Jackson’s vast 13th District, which runs from just northwest of Fort Worth to the top of the Panhandle, and has the highest concentration of GOP voters of any U.S. House district.

Both reflect and stoke mistrust of government and institutions. Neither invented it.

But Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor University, blames the surge of cases this summer in part on an “organized and deliberate” crusade from “the far-right element of the Republican Party.”

What they framed as freedom from mandates has fueled resistance to sound medical advice, he argues.

“They basically engineered the return of COVID-19 to the Southern United States,” Hotez told CNN recently. “This came out of conservative members of the United States Congress. It came out of the cable news channels from the conservative right.”

Herd immunity requires at least 70% of the populace to be vaccinated, and the vast majority of hospitalizations and fatalities are among the unvaccinated.

“I think it makes good sense for a lot of folks to get the vaccine,” Jackson, a retired Navy admiral, said in December on Fox News. “But there’s a large population where this virus is not going to have a devastating impact on your health and you’re going to get sick for a few days if you even end up getting it, and you’re going to recover fine.”

Last month, he warned on Fox that “this is still an experimental vaccine being used under an emergency use authorization.”

Only nine of the 23 Texas Republicans in the U.S. House say they have been fully vaccinated, along with Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. The rest have refused to say, which keeps them out of the crosshairs of vaccination opposers while disappointing infectious disease experts who wish they’d step up and accept the role of role model.

“I don’t think it’s anybody’s damn business whether I’m vaccinated or not,” Rep. Chip Roy, an Austin Republican, told CNN in July. “The American people are fully capable of making an educated decision about whether they want to get the vaccine or not.”

Roy’s district, which runs from Austin to San Antonio and takes in much of the Hill Country, is 54% vaccinated.

Pro-vaccine doctor in the House

Rep. Michael Burgess, the other physician in the Texas delegation, has been forceful in advocating for vaccination and wishes his colleagues weren’t so closed-mouthed about their own status.

“If we want the country to get better, we should say,” said Burgess, a Republican from Pilot Point in suburban Dallas and an obstetrician. “The country is not going to get better till people get vaccinated.”

Unlike some GOP colleagues who raise doubts about safety or efficacy, Burgess calls vaccines the “best part of modern medicine.” More than 53% of his constituents are fully vaccinated, above average for Texas and slightly higher than the national rate of 52%.

Yet even he defends Texans’ right to skip the shot, reflecting how delicate the topic is for Republicans. “What you do is your business,” he said.

And he rejects suggestions that fellow Republicans have driven vaccine hesitancy through misinformation, poor role modeling, or secrecy about their own vaccination status.

“The last thing we need to be doing is dividing people,” he said. “Don’t just be putting this on Republican political leaders.”

At least seven Texans in Congress have tested positive since the pandemic began.

That includes Rep. Ron Wright, an Arlington Republican who died in February, the first sitting member of Congress to succumb to COVID-19. He had planned to get his first shot but then fell sick.

In his district, 45% of eligible residents are fully vaccinated.

While most Republican lawmakers are not spreading unfounded rumors about the vaccine, silence or lack of enthusiasm also sends a message, said Renee Cross, director of the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston.

“It seems to be that it’s more ‘I’m not going to say anything’ rather than saying something really negative,” Cross said. “But not saying anything has a dampening effect as well.”

According to an analysis from Harvard University researchers, Republicans represent the districts with the best and worst vaccination rates in Texas, with rates ranging from 60% in the Collin County-based district held by Rep. Van Taylor of Plano to the almost 33% in Gohmert’s district.

Taylor frequently posts about vaccination outreach and encourages constituents to sign up for the shot.

He’s one of nine Texas Republicans in the U.S. House who say they’re fully vaccinated, along with Burgess, Jackson and Reps. Kevin Brady of The Woodlands, John Carter of Round Rock, Kay Granger of Fort Worth, Michael McCaul of Austin, Pete Sessions of Waco and August Pfluger of San Angelo.

Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar’s district in El Paso ranks second at 59%.

The Democrat with the lowest rate, 46%, is Rep. Marc Veasey, whose district runs from his hometown of Fort Worth to West Dallas.

Every Democrat in the House has been fully vaccinated, including the 13 from Texas.

By comparison, at last count only 53 of 211 Republicans in the U.S. House acknowledged having been vaccinated.

‘An echo chamber’

As COVID-19 cases and deaths mount, public health experts have sounded the alarm about political messaging that casts doubt on the vaccines.

“It becomes an echo chamber…. It is giving them a megaphone when they don’t have the right info,” said Vivian Ho, a health economist at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “People tend to think ‘Oh, this is a government official and they have information I don’t have. So if that’s what they think it must be true.’”

Republican governors — including Texas’ Greg Abbott, who tested positive earlier this month despite being fully vaccinated — have opposed mandates around masks and vaccines.

In April, Twitter invoked rules against spreading disinformation and suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., for a week after she tweeted that “vaccines are failing and do not reduce the spread of the virus.”

Former president Donald Trump, who retains enormous influence with GOP voters, has sent mixed messages. He routinely boasts of his role in the speedy development of coronavirus vaccines, but at a rally in Phoenix last month he told supporters that he “supported their freedoms a hundred percent.”

Most recently, Trump was booed at a Saturday rally in Alabama after urging the crowd to get vaccinated.

Roy, among others, has used rhetoric that seems to challenge the scientific consensus that vaccinations mitigate symptoms and limit spread, even if they’re not completely effective against the delta variant.

“Which is it, vaccines or masks? Do the vaccines work or they don’t work?” he asked on the House floor last month during an angry tirade after Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a mask mandate inside the chamber.

The outburst drew national attention, with conservatives lauding him for pushing back against the mask rule.

Prior Texas mandate fight

Heated fights over public health mandates aren’t new to Texas.

In February 2007, then-governor Rick Perry irked fellow Republicans with an executive order requiring girls entering 6th grade to receive the vaccine against human papillomavirus, unless their parents opted out by submitting a conscientious objector affidavit.

HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease and the main cause of cervical cancer.

“I refuse to look a young woman in the eye who suffers from this form of cancer and tell her we could have stopped it, but we didn’t,” Perry said during a State of the State address.

In Perry’s 15-year tenure, the longest of any Texas governor, the HPV controversy was probably the biggest uproar.

GOP lawmakers and conservative activists accused him of overstepping his authority and inserting the state into matters better left to parents.

Although Perry backed down, he maintained he was right – until his run for president in August 2011. The issue loomed over his effort to court conservatives and he backtracked, saying he now realized he’d made a mistake.

Cross, the political scientist, said the best way to combat vaccine hesitancy among conservatives is for GOP leaders to change their messaging – offering unequivocal support for the shot and actively combatting conspiracy theories floating around right-wing circles.

“It needs to come from those that are really influential, not only on a local level but on a national level,” Cross said. “A lot of folks are not going to respond to a Mitch McConnell. But they will respond to Trump or even Louie Gohmert. That’s what we need.”

Washington bureau chief Todd J. Gillman contributed to this report.