vaccinated. one by one. you doing all right? yes, ma am. you had your shot? i hadn t really made my mind up. you think it s going to do something to you? the virus yet? got it. i had. that wasn t enough for you to make your mind up? i m going to get you in a minute. you saw her right there. joining me is dorothy oliver. she went door to door and managed to get 94% of the 400 residents in panola, alabama, vaccinated. thank you so much for joining me. i have to share with you, listening to you, i was thinking of some of my elders in my family getting our ears pulled if we re not doing the right thing. talk to me how, dorothy, you ve been able to demonstrate so much love to your community that you are knocking door to door. yes, well, we started way back when it first started back with the elder people.
and i decided that we need to start early so we can kind of educate the older people so they can be aware how serious this disease is. and i started just calling on the phone, the first that s how we first started, calling on the phone, talking to different ones and letting them know they re about to start the vaccination and everything. it s important to get it because this disease is just taking peoples out every day. so that s where we started it and then we went from there and started going around to their house and just talked to people face-to-face. didn t have any problem. everybody, you know, just worked with me real well. but i ve been working this community for over close to 40 years. been working in different projects ever since i ve been there. been here in this community. so it was fairly easy to work with them. dorothy, i think what you are demonstrating is the commitment
if you ever consider running for mayor? no. i had to ask. thank you so much. i don t think so. thank you, dorothy oliver, for being so loving to your community and showing us by example. you are a subject of the new yorker documentary, the panola project. you can catch more there. thank you. there s another crisis building across america that is about to collide with the covid crisis in a major way. more than 11 million americans report they are currently behind on rent. while 3.5 million people who depend on rent say they are very likely to face eviction because of the pandemic, according to the latest census bureau statistics. on august 26th, the u.s. national moratorium on evictions ended following a 6-3 vote by the supreme court leaving many without a lifeline as covid
dorothy oliver and county commissioner, drucilla rush jackson, who took the time to go door to door to convince neighbors to get the vaccine. their work has gotten nearly every resident vaccinated, 97% of the town, in a state that has one of the lowest rates in the country. one of the women featured in the documentary, dorothy oliver. we re so happy to have you with us this morning. thank you for joining us. i want to underline those two numbers, the state of alabama, 38% vaccination rate. your town, panola, alabama, 97%. how did you do do it? we decided the best way to do it, first of all, we started calling on the phone trying to take them to make the shot, make the appointment, and after we see we need to go a little bit further, so we decide to bring the vaccination to panola.
make it better for them, you know, just bring it to panola and make sure nobody wouldn t have an excuse not to get it. so 97%, dorothy, did you have to twist anybody s arm or when you showed up knocking at the door because as you said, you are so trusted in your community, did they say, yeah, dorothy, i ll do it? it wasn t that easy. a lot of them it was. a lot of them said, thank you, we appreciate it. we didn t even know what we had to do to get it. and then we had that few that we had to really twist their arm to try to get it. they had a lot of excuses, you know, they had a lot of excuses, i just want to wait to see what it going to do to everybody else or i just think it s politics. they had a lot of different reasons, so we didn t have a lot of people like that. just a few of them. dorothy, a lot of people in the country are having conversations with family members or neighbors or people you care about. it would be interesting for the