An academic named Laura Smith recently took to the Washington Post with a pointed but overly facile diagnosis: “The spread of covid-19 in the South shows the risks of anti-intellectualism.” In the piece, she argues that anti-science bias has plagued the region’s coronavirus response. She doesn’t come close to proving it.

Smith criticizes the southern states’ “early reopening plans and hands-off measures.” Nearly all the southern states instituted some form of lockdown to tackle the virus, which is hardly hands-off. It’s true that they generally began to lift their lockdowns earlier than some other parts of the country, but then again, their outbreaks were generally less severe.