Five years ago this week, The New Yorker published a story about what it was like inside a hospital in Springfield, Missouri, during the Delta wave.

The reporting is hard to read. A nurse named Kali Blair described the ward they called the Tower — alarms going off, patients screaming, tarps hung on PVC pipe between the beds. On one day in July 2021, she told six different families there was nothing left to do to save the person they loved. Patients kept asking her the same question: Am I going to make it out of here? She said she never knew how to answer, "because a lot of them don't."

Almost everyone in those beds could have avoided them. Of the roughly one thousand COVID patients CoxHealth admitted after June 1 that year, about 95 percent were unvaccinated.

And dropped into the middle of that story, in one short paragraph, is a tweet from the congressman whose district sits just east of Springfield.

What he actually said

On July 17, 2021, Jason Smith posted this:

"The Biden administration wants to knock down your door KGB-style to force people to get vaccinated. We must oppose forced vaccination!"

It is still up. It has been up for five years.

Here is what he was reacting to. On July 6, President Biden gave a speech about getting more shots into arms. The line that set Republicans off was this one: "Now we need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes, door to door — literally knocking on doors — to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus."

Knocking on doors. To hand people information.

That was never a secret. Two days after the speech, press secretary Jen Psaki said the people doing the knocking were "not members of the government. They are not federal government employees. They are volunteers. They are clergy. They are trusted voices in communities" — one of several clarifications CNN gathered up in a fact-check published July 14, three days before Smith's tweet. CNN's verdict on the Republican version of events: "misleading fearmongering that ignore what the administration's plan actually does."

Smith posted it anyway.

And the New Yorker reporter who was standing in Springfield at the time noted the obvious: the door-knocking was already happening, and it was being done by the Springfield-Greene County Health Department. Two local health workers, walking a neighborhood, leaving a paper door hanger that said "Walk-ins Welcome."

That's the KGB.

He'd taken the vaccine himself

This is the part that should end the argument.

Two months later, on September 10, 2021, Smith published a column on his own House website attacking Biden's employer vaccine rule. Buried in the middle of it, he wrote this:

"As I've said many times, I took the Trump shot. I believe it works."

He took it. He believed it worked. He said so in writing.

So when he told the people of southern Missouri that the government wanted to knock down their doors "KGB-style" over a vaccine, he was not a skeptic warning his neighbors about something he feared. He was a vaccinated man scaring unvaccinated people about a shot he had already rolled up his sleeve for.

Back in March 2021, when States Newsroom asked every member of Missouri's delegation whether they'd been vaccinated, four said yes on the record — Emanuel Cleaver, Vicky Hartzler, Billy Long and Ann Wagner. The rest, the survey noted, did not respond. Smith was in the second group. He'd tell the public he took it — six months later, in a column about how outrageous it was to ask people to take it.

The counties he represents were the ones dying

Smith's tweet did not land in a vacuum. It landed in one of the least vaccinated corners of the country, in the middle of the deadliest surge that region ever saw.

Three days before he posted it, Ozarks public radio station KSMU reported that six Missouri counties still had vaccination rates under 20 percent: McDonald, Douglas, Ozark, Howell, Ripley, and Oregon.

Five of those six — Douglas, Ozark, Howell, Ripley and Oregon — are inside Missouri's 8th District. Smith's district. His own constituents.

Then the bill came due. July 2021 turned out to be the deadliest month of that year in Missouri after January, with 499 confirmed COVID deaths — and state officials warned the real number was higher, because Missouri didn't even count deaths found by antigen tests. By mid-August the state was 43.4 percent fully vaccinated while the country was at 50.9 percent, and hospitals in St. Louis were cutting back care for everybody else to make room.

ProPublica, reporting on Missouri Republicans that same month, put Smith's tweet in the plainest possible terms: when the CDC sent a two-person "surge response" team to help southwest Missouri, Smith and Governor Mike Parson "tweeted opposition to federal agents going door to door to compel vaccines, something President Joe Biden's administration said it never had any intent to do."

Two people were coming to help. Smith told his constituents it was the secret police.

He never let it go

If this were one bad tweet on one bad night, it would be worth forgetting. It wasn't.

• October 2021 — Smith co-signed a letter demanding the White House budget office withdraw the vaccine rule for employers. His own office headlined the announcement "Authoritarian Federal Vaccine Mandate," and Smith called the rule an "affront to individual liberty."
• February 2022 — he published a column called "Their Permanent Pandemic Narrative," in which he described school masks as "useless facemasks," said Biden wanted to use the virus "to usher in the biggest expansion of federal power and Washington bureaucrat control in generations," and quoted Charlton Heston's line about "my cold, dead hands."

Nowhere in any of it does he tell the people in Howell or Ripley or Oregon County the thing he had already told them once, quietly, in one sentence: that he took the shot and it works.

Where he ended up

Five years later Jason Smith is not a backbencher tweeting into the dark. He chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, one of the most powerful committees in Congress, and part of its job is overseeing the Department of Health and Human Services.

On April 16, 2026, he gaveled in a hearing with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and used his opening statement to thank Kennedy "for using HHS as a platform to Make America Healthy Again." He talked about chronic disease, hospital consolidation, insurance company profits and Medicare fraud. In the entire opening statement, the word "vaccine" does not appear once.

Meanwhile the actual health of his district keeps getting worse on his watch. The budget bill he wrote the tax provisions for is projected to strip health coverage from 32,167 people in Missouri's 8th District — 18,667 on Medicaid, 13,500 on Affordable Care Act plans — according to the Joint Economic Committee.

And he still won't sit in a room with them. Constituents have been circulating a petition asking him to hold a public, in-person town hall because, as they put it, "too often, we hear about your work through partisan press releases, closed-door events, or D.C. talking points." When people in Poplar Bluff held their own event in June 2025 to talk about his health care cuts, he didn't show — someone propped a photo of him next to the podium and a constituent spoke to the picture.

The thing that can't be taken back

You can fix a bad vote. You can repeal a bad law.

You cannot go back to July 2021 and tell the man in the Tower — the one Kali Blair said asked her whether he was going to make it out — that his congressman had the vaccine in his own arm the whole time he was telling people the government was coming for their doors.

Southern Missouri didn't need a scare. It needed somebody with a microphone to say the simple, true thing Jason Smith had already written down for himself: I took the shot. I believe it works.

He said it once, in a column, in the middle of an argument about something else. He never said it when it counted.

We deserve better.

Source

Peter Slevin, The Struggle to Vaccinate Springfield, Missouri, The New Yorker, August 6, 2021. Photographs by Aaron DuRall for The New Yorker.