Nearly Everyone in Dimmit County Is Infected or Vaccinated. Now What?
Each day, Carrizo Springs city manager Terry McCalpin boils orange and lemon peels in a pot to make a supposed coronavirus preventative that’s been touted on social media. He drinks a tablespoon of the concoction, chasing it down with zinc, the blood pressure drug reserpine, and vitamin D3. McCalpin, a 58-year-old former police officer who describes himself as a “high-risk candidate for the virus” because of health problems, estimates that he’s been in close proximity to eight people with COVID-19 over the past year and a half without falling ill.
Like most residents of rural Dimmit County, where Carrizo Springs is located, McCalpin is fully vaccinated. But a steady diet of online misinformation, and the continued proliferation of the virus, has convinced him the vaccine doesn’t work. “I did some research and started taking a couple supplements, and I believe this is why I’ve never contracted the virus,” he recently told me. (There is no evidence that McCalpin’s regimen has any efficacy against COVID-19.)
McCalpin’s fear of the virus is understandable. One in three Dimmit County residents have contracted COVID since the pandemic began—the highest case rate in Texas. Fifteen new cases are reported every day in the rural South Texas county of 10,124 people, and the test positivity rate is 23 percent, suggesting that the Delta variant is spreading rapidly. Around a third of the patients at Dimmit Regional Hospital have tested positive for COVID. But unlike in other parts of Texas, where the virus is surging and vaccination rates remain stubbornly low, Dimmit County residents, by and large, are fighting back.
South Texas counties have embraced the COVID vaccines with more enthusiasm than any other part of Texas, and that’s true of Dimmit. Ninety-eight percent of its residents above the age of twelve have received at least one shot, and 66 percent are fully vaccinated—the fourteenth-highest rate in the state. From January to April, the Dimmit County Regional Hospital operated one of the state’s first major vaccination hubs, delivering more than 21,000 doses. Visitors came from other states, or crossed the border from Mexico, to get the jab. “People were going anywhere they could to get an appointment,” said hospital CEO John Graves. “If people wanted a vaccine, we gave it to them.”
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-coronavirus-herd-immunity-dimmit/
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I have been heavily involved in research for the last two decades. It entails a hypothesis, experiments to test the hypothesis, collection of the results, and the knowledge to interpret the results. Then it takes publishing the results and having those results scrutinized. But the very first step is finding money to pay for the research.
So what the hell kind of research are all these yahoos doing? Do they mean literature reviews? Ones that are peer reviewed? Reading shit off the internet does not constitute research. Why are people so disconnected from reality? 
