Vaccine education campaign planned
Encouragement effort to launch in January
A long-delayed education campaign aimed at encouraging Americans to get vaccinated against the coronavirus will launch in January, federal health officials said Tuesday.
An earlier effort ran into trouble over concerns it was part of a $265 million, celebrity-studded campaign to “defeat despair” surrounding COVID-19 before the presidential election.
A review of the campaign was conducted, and the Department of Health and Human Services was cleared to proceed Nov. 13, a senior agency public affairs official said in a background briefing.
The science-based campaign will include TV, radio and print ads that emphasize the power of the vaccines to stop the spread of the virus and help communities.
The public information campaign lags the nation’s vaccination effort, which began Dec. 14 with health care workers. Managing expectations is a crucial part of guiding the program, the HHS official said.
“At this point in time, we really are being cautious about not creating demand when the product is not available to the mass of the public,” said the official, who spoke under the condition that the person’s name and title not be used.
Beginning the media campaign in January makes sense, said Glen Nowak, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Health and Risk Communications and a former communication director for the National Immunization Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“You have to match up your message with people’s ability to actually get what you’re promoting,” he said. “If you tell people to do something and they can’t, that’s going to lead to frustration.”
HHS officials said it was better to
provide general education now and push later.
There was only so much that could be done before it was known which vaccines were going to be approved and what their characteristics were, Nowak said.
“You can do some things. Talking to and finding the key influencers for groups who are going to be hesitant about vaccines and establishing those relations as early as possible is good. But it would have been hard to do much more than that,” he said.
HHS is organizing the campaign with help from multiple agencies. They work with public relations firms that are minority-owned and have long relationships with Black, Hispanic and Native American communities.
The campaign plans to include spokespeople and members of communities of color to get the word out. Google may be involved in health messaging. The goal is to provide information so people can make up their own minds, HHS officials said.
Despite a slower-than-expected pace, vaccine should become more widely available to people over 65 and in high-risk groups in the coming weeks and months. It’s already being distributed to people 65 and older in Florida after Gov. Ron DeSantis decided to bump seniors to the front of the line.
The message the public hears will change over time as more vaccine becomes available. Ads in January will be different from those in June to remain relevant.