The New Yorker Documentary
An Alabama Woman’s Neighborly Vaccination Campaign
In “The Panola Project,” Dorothy Oliver fights vaccine hesitancy with kindness.
Film by Rachael DeCruz and Jeremy S. Levine
Text by Yasmine Al-Sayyad
August 11, 2021
***
When asked how she talks people into signing up to get immunized, Oliver said, “I just be nice to them.”
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 New Yorker Documentary
An Alabama Woman’s Neighborly Vaccination Campaign
In “The Panola Project,” Dorothy Oliver fights vaccine hesitancy with kindness.
Film by Rachael DeCruz and Jeremy S. Levine
Text by Yasmine Al-Sayyad
August 11, 2021
When asked how she talks people into signing up to get immunized, Oliver said, “I just be nice to them.”
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.”
The New Yorker Documentary
View the latest or submit your own film.
Panola never had its own vaccine center. The closest options were thirty to forty miles away, and many residents don’t have cars. In the film, Oliver and Russ-Jackson arrange for a hospital to set up a pop-up site in Panola, but the site will only be established if they get at least forty people to sign up to take the vaccine. We follow Oliver as she goes door to door, talking people into signing up, lightly cajoling them about their fears and concerns. When I asked her how she does it, her answer was disarmingly simple: “I just be nice to them,” she said. “I don’t go at them saying, ‘You gotta do that.’ ” DeCruz, too, was struck by the way Oliver and Jackson talked to people who were on the fence about the vaccine, an issue more often discussed with stridency of various types. “There’s this very warm and kind of loving and caring way that Dorothy and Ms. Jackson approached those conversations, even when people aren’t in agreement. And it wasn’t done in a way that’s, like, ‘I know better than you.’ ”
Oliver’s charm with the skeptics is remarkable, but so is her determination to bring the vaccine to her underserved town. Most of the women and men Oliver talked to leaped at the opportunity to sign up for the vaccine. On vaccine day, they rolled down their car windows to thank her. “We appreciate y’all giving it to us, because a lot of people don’t really know where to go to take these vaccines,” one woman tells her. Vaccine hesitancy in Black communities has been harped on in the media, but those conversations can gloss over questions of availability. Levine told me that they were struck by how many people had put off vaccination for logistical rather than ideological reasons. In Panola, he says, they regularly heard people say, “I want the shot. How do I get this? I don’t have a car; how am I going to get forty miles to the closest hospital and back?”
Alabama has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country; only fifty-six per cent of adults have gotten at least one dose. Nearly everyone in Panola has—a striking ninety-four per cent of adults—including every single person above the age of sixty-five. DeCruz and Levine were living in Alabama when they worked on the film. “With everything that was happening there, we were looking for a story that had some hope in it,” DeCruz told me, “to show people doing good work. Just finding some light in some dark times.” Meanwhile, Oliver is keeping on. “I have the names of everyone who hasn’t been vaccinated, and I’m still working on them,” she told me.
“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.”
The New Yorker Documentary
View the latest or submit your own film.
Panola never had its own vaccine center. The closest options were thirty to forty miles away, and many residents don’t have cars. In the film, Oliver and Russ-Jackson arrange for a hospital to set up a pop-up site in Panola, but the site will only be established if they get at least forty people to sign up to take the vaccine. We follow Oliver as she goes door to door, talking people into signing up, lightly cajoling them about their fears and concerns. When I asked her how she does it, her answer was disarmingly simple: “I just be nice to them,” she said. “I don’t go at them saying, ‘You gotta do that.’ ” DeCruz, too, was struck by the way Oliver and Jackson talked to people who were on the fence about the vaccine, an issue more often discussed with stridency of various types. “There’s this very warm and kind of loving and caring way that Dorothy and Ms. Jackson approached those conversations, even when people aren’t in agreement. And it wasn’t done in a way that’s, like, ‘I know better than you.’ ”
Oliver’s charm with the skeptics is remarkable, but so is her determination to bring the vaccine to her underserved town. Most of the women and men Oliver talked to leaped at the opportunity to sign up for the vaccine. On vaccine day, they rolled down their car windows to thank her. “We appreciate y’all giving it to us, because a lot of people don’t really know where to go to take these vaccines,” one woman tells her. Vaccine hesitancy in Black communities has been harped on in the media, but those conversations can gloss over questions of availability. Levine told me that they were struck by how many people had put off vaccination for logistical rather than ideological reasons. In Panola, he says, they regularly heard people say, “I want the shot. How do I get this? I don’t have a car; how am I going to get forty miles to the closest hospital and back?”
Alabama has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country; only fifty-six per cent of adults have gotten at least one dose. Nearly everyone in Panola has—a striking ninety-four per cent of adults—including every single person above the age of sixty-five. DeCruz and Levine were living in Alabama when they worked on the film. “With everything that was happening there, we were looking for a story that had some hope in it,” DeCruz told me, “to show people doing good work. Just finding some light in some dark times.” Meanwhile, Oliver is keeping on. “I have the names of everyone who hasn’t been vaccinated, and I’m still working on them,” she told me."
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