OUR VIEW

When it comes to trust in government, experts who analyze and study will assure most people trust those closest to them.

Bladen County comes before North Carolina, and both of those before the federal government. Yes, even here where elections shenanigans have myths, legends and a bit of the unexplained no matter how many outsiders try to dip a toe in and take their best shot.

Unlucky is a friendly way to put what happened to our confidence late last week.

Friday, the president was offering remarks from the White House on the jobs report for July. It was a day on which he would finally get some time off over the weekend.

He should have made it a long one and left Thursday.

Cameras rolled and captured the moment, then social media had a field day. He had a good message, that there’s a need for vaccinations so the pandemic can be put behind us.

Only he said, after checking his notes to be sure, that 350 million Americans had already been vaccinated. With census numbers pending, we’re a nation of about 331 million — total!

Closer to home, we were finding out that the state’s Department of Health and Human Services is no longer offering its five-tier — once upon a time three tier until things were getting too positive — County Alert System in favor of going with the information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To be honest, this makes some sense. Unity is a good thing, right?

Well, if the numbers make sense. And after the first weekend, they don’t and they’re not even close.

It’s not the transmission level of COVID-19 being listed as high, though the large swath of the state — 89 counties — is quite unnerving and a radical jump from where the state said we were two weeks earlier. The “sticker shock” is in the vaccination numbers.

The state says Bladen County has 11,643 fully vaccinated individuals, or 36 percent of the total population.

The CDC says Bladen County has 8,541 fully vaccinated individuals, or 26 percent of the total population.

Who knew we could come to like, even want, something that Gov. Roy Cooper and cabinet-level Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen have a hand in with this pandemic? They’ve roiled us and thousands of small businesses from Murphy to Manteo since the outset, making the virus a political football, and restricting our freedoms in the name of “science and data” that can be manipulated as easily as saying a .300 hitting baseball Hall of Famer is awful because he makes outs 70 percent of the time.

Who to believe? And why? It’s a question we’ve had for a long time, particularly when it comes to that “percent tested positive” metric that gets so much attention and weight in the equation.

Most people only get tested if believing they’re sick, and the threshold not to worry is for 95 percent of them to be wrong. Sigh.

Let’s keep it simple. And this most agree to trust.

Vaccinations have worked.

Beyond that, we believe it’s everyone’s choice, and we believe everyone should be encouraged to get one. It’ll help us get past the pandemic quicker than the controversial masks, lockdowns or anything else.

Including muddled information from those we should be able to trust.