The $1.9 million in pandemic aid would have gone a long way in Cochise County, a rural borderland where a winter of infections swamped hospitals. There was money for tracking cases. Testing in remote ranching towns. Funds fortifying the Arizona county’s strained health department.

But the county’s Republican-controlled board of supervisors stunned many residents and health care workers by voting last month to reject the federal money, becoming one of the rare places in America to turn down Covid-19 assistance from Washington.

“We’re done,” said Peggy Judd, one of two Republican supervisors who voted against accepting the money. “We’re treating it like the common cold.”

The vote transformed what would usually be a rote line on a government agenda into an emotional flashpoint in this county of 125,000 people where life is shaped by the southwestern border, rhythms of ranching and, now, a pandemic that has killed 522 residents.

news of the 2-1 vote in The Herald/Review, the local newspaper. Some criticized the supervisors for reinforcing local vaccine resistance with a welter of anti-vaccine misinformation.

a survey from the National League of Cities, representing a tiny fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into cities and states.

who had opposed the measure. The money has flowed toward schools, health care systems and affordable housing, but also non-Covid projects such as prison construction, highway projects and tax cuts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Some tiny towns say they have no use for the coronavirus relief as the pandemic trudges into a third year. And other conservative rural officials are turning down the money as a public repudiation of vaccine mandates, the $30 trillion national debt and a persistent pandemic that is killing 2,500 people each day even as new cases ebb and Democratic states lift pandemic restrictions like mask rules.

In Cochise County, critics said they were particularly stung by the timing. The January vote rejecting the money came as Omicron cases surged across the county, with the federal government sending in a 15-person strike team at the request of the county’s largest hospital, Canyon Vista Medical Center.

Since there are few intensive-care beds in the county, doctors said they were spending hours on the phone pleading with crowded hospitals in Utah, Texas or Phoenix to take patients too sick to stay in Cochise County. State data shows that about 70 percent of the county’s residents are vaccinated, but health workers say those numbers may be inflated by Mexican citizens who cross the border to get vaccinated.

The Cochise supervisors who voted against the $1.9 million have raised doubts about the safety and reliability of the vaccines, despite no evidence. Ms. Judd said she and her family had recovered from Covid-19 in November after drinking orange juice spiked with ivermectin, a drug commonly used to treat animal parasites that has become a go-to remedy for vaccine opponents. She said she and her family remain unvaccinated.

“We’re those people,” she said in a telephone interview, coughing occasionally — a lingering sign of the infection.