As variant rises, vaccine plan focuses on ‘movable middle’
Thrown off-stride to reach its COVID-19 vaccination goal, the Biden administration is sending A-list officials across the country, devising ads for niche markets and enlisting community organizers to persuade unvaccinated people to get a shot.
The strategy has the trappings of a political campaign, complete with data crunching to identify groups that can be won over.
But the message is about public health, not ideology. The focus is a group health officials term the “movable middle” — some 55 million unvaccinated adults seen as persuadable, many of them under 30.
“We’re not just going to do the mass vaccination sites,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. “It’s door to door. It’s mobile clinics. We’re doing vaccinations at church, the PTA meeting, the barber shop, the grocery store.”
Officials have seized on a compelling new talking point, courtesy of the coronavirus. The potent delta variant that has ravaged India is spreading here. Now accounting for about 1 in 5 virus samples genetically decoded in the U.S., the more transmissible mutation has gained a foothold in Mountain West and heartland states. Many of those infected are young and unvaccinated.
The White House has lent its top names to the vaccine push.
President Joe Biden visited a mobile vaccination site last week in Raleigh, North Carolina. First lady Jill Biden held the hand of a woman Thursday at a drive-thru vaccination site in Kissimmee, Florida.
Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice President Kamala
Harris, has visited at least 18 or 19 states by his count.
The administration also has recruited celebrities and athletes, including country music star Brad Paisley and the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team. It has teamed up with Twitch and Riot Games to reach online gamers and with Panera and Chipotle to offer free food to those getting a shot.
The message, as Surgeon General Vivek Murthy put it: “If you are vaccinated, you are protected. If you are not, the threat of variants is real and growing.”
It’s unclear how well the levers of persuasion are functioning.
Vaccination rates have dropped below 1 million a day, and there’s no sign yet of a turnaround. The administration has acknowledged that it will fall short of its goal of having 70% of adults vaccinated by July Fourth.
At this point, about 170 million American adults have received at least one vaccine dose, representing roughly two-thirds of those 18 and older.
Analysts at HHS have developed a rough sketch of those in the movable middle.
They tend to be younger, mainly 18-29. Most are not college educated, and political independents predominate. Black and Latino adults
are more likely to fall in this category than people of other backgrounds.
It can be a hard sell.
After Jill Biden’s visit to Mississippi last week, Gulf Coast resident Sherie Bardwell was unimpressed.
She said Biden’s comment that “vaccines might feel like a miracle, but there’s no faith required,” sounded to her like a dig at people with Christian beliefs.
Bardwell said both she and her husband had COVID-19 and she was hospitalized.
“My thoughts are, if you’ve already had the coronavirus, why do you need the vaccine?” asked Bardwell. “If the vaccine was the ‘miracle,’ then why are you still at risk of contracting the virus after receiving the shot? It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
Doctors advise recovered patients to get vaccinated so as to maintain protection.
Early success with vaccination has paradoxically made things more difficult.
Now that cases and deaths have dropped to levels not seen since the onset of the pandemic, officials say it’s become harder to convince Americans of the urgency of getting a shot — particularly younger people who already knew they were at low risk of serious complications.