HALEYVILLE, Ala. – Tending a thrift store that displays a faded Trump flag in a nearly all-white Alabama county with a long history of going against the grain, Dwight Owensby is among the area's many skeptics of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Owensby, 77, said he doesn't often watch TV news or read the local paper, and he doesn't spend much time talking about the pandemic with others — it's just not a big topic in this rural, heavily forested part of the state.
But he suspects the coronavirus pandemic was planned, as a discredited conspiracy theory holds, and he said there's no way he's getting any shot. “If it’s your time to go, you’re going to go.