By Yasmine Al-Sayyad, The New Yorker, August 11, 2021
In a recent, widely circulated Op-Ed, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein derided the “conventional wisdom” in the public-health discussion of covid-19 vaccines that “there is some argument, yet unmade and perhaps undiscovered, that will change the minds of the roughly 30 percent of American adults who haven’t gotten at least one dose.” The vaccinated are at the end of their tether with the holdouts. With covid cases on the rise once again, business executives, local governments, universities, and, most recently, the federal government are out of patience, exchanging solicitations for tougher vaccine mandates. “Persuasion,” Klein argues, “is by no means impossible or unimportant, but on electric topics, it is a marginal phenomenon.”
“The Panola Project,” a short documentary by Rachael DeCruz and Jeremy S. Levine, is a heartwarming story of this marginal phenomenon. It follows the efforts of a retired Black woman, Dorothy Oliver, and the county commissioner, Drucilla Russ-Jackson, to bring the vaccine to her isolated hamlet of about four hundred residents in rural Alabama, and to persuade enough of her community to take it. “I just felt like I had to do it because the government, nobody does enough in this area,” she says. “This area here is majority Black. Kind of puts you on the back burner. That’s just it. I mean, you don’t have to put nothing else with that. That’s just it. I don’t have to elaborate on that one.”
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