This Manitoba community has a vaccination rate of 24% against COVID-19. Here's why
CBC
Outsiders depict his rural Manitoba community as one divided over COVID-19 vaccines, but that isn't how Willie Penner sees it.
Within the company he keeps, Penner, who is unvaccinated, doesn't hear any discord.
Nobody in his bubble is vaccinated against COVID-19. Not his wife working in health-care, nor his brothers and sisters living near and far. His in-laws and his good friend have no interest in the vaccine. His church says the choice is his.
In the Rural Municipality of Stanley, 100 kilometres south of Winnipeg, Penner is living in a bubble of the unvaccinated. He wouldn't have it any other way.
"Only [person] I feel pressure from is Dr. Roussin in Winnipeg," he said, naming Brent Roussin, Manitoba's chief public health officer and the person who in many ways is the public face of the province's pandemic response.
"That's where you feel the pressure. He wants people to get vaccinated and everybody has the right not to."
Penner's rural municipality — an overwhelmingly conservative, white, deeply Christian community where German is the second most-common language — has been treated like a pariah by some fully inoculated persons, given Stanley's stubbornly low vaccination rate.