Fox News and football: Conn. financier tackles vaccine hesitancy
DARIEN — Low vaccination rates in rural America caused Darien resident Ted Huffman a few sleepless nights in the summer of 2021.
“My goodness, I’ve got to do something,” Huffman recalled thinking after he watched a news segment about the surge in COVID-19 rates affecting children in his home state of Arkansas. “And I wished that desire to want to do something would go away. But it wouldn’t. It just kept keeping me up at night and bothering me and tugging at my heart.”
The result? A public service advertisement that Huffman paid to air during football games and on conservative media outlets across the country, encouraging vaccine skeptics to overcome their fears and take the shot.
Supply, but no demand
By the time Huffman was reading headlines about the precipitous rise in COVID-19 cases, most states had an abundance of vaccines. But many residents, especially in rural America where cases had skyrocketed, appeared resistant to getting them. Even as availability increased, vaccination rates remained stagnant in several southern states.
Huffman began brainstorming possible solutions in September, leading to the formation of The GreenShoots
Foundation. Huffman and his wife Cheryl Huffman started the foundation with the intent to run a non-judgmental “loving and uplifting” campaign that would help overcome vaccine hesitancy in rural American.
To Huffman, who grew up in small-town Arkansas — and who still retains a Southern accent despite years of working on Wall Street where he now is a senior director at an investment management firm — the condemnation he had seen leveled at people living in the rural South, especially about vaccine hesitancy, was unwarranted.
“They’re very loving people, very service-oriented people. They’re very smart people,” Huffman said. “And so my view was, if they are choosing to not get vaccinated — even though I don’t understand it — there must be a compelling reason. This must be real, for them to elect to not get vaccinated.”
Huffman said he worked backwards — first acknowledging the anti-government mentality of many of the people in smaller towns, then trying to understand how to craft an ad that would not turn people away from a message to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
“A message of respect and love”
Working with a Darienbased agency, the foundation funded a one-and-ahalf minute ad that skirts
any institutional overtones and instead touches on universal human values — such as the love for children and respect for your neighbors, Huffman said.
Shot in Arkansas over a three-day period in midNovember 2021, the ad shows a farmer watching his children and his elderly neighbors before deciding to visit a vaccination clinic.
The campaign aired during the Thanksgiving football season and Huffman purchased ad slots on conservative media, including Fox News and local radio shows.
“I even paid for it to air on Tucker Carlson,” Huffman said, referencing one of Fox News’ most conservative — and controversial — political commentators.
The campaign reported
a 9 percent increase in vaccination rates in the county containing Arkansas’ biggest city, versus similar-sized cities in neighboring Mississippi without the campaign, according to data the foundation collected.
While Huffman said he cannot be sure that the increase in those rates was solely due to the ad, he views it as a positive result nonetheless. And
even more telling was how the state of Arkansas — along with states across the country — began airing the ad for free on local stations as a public service announcement.
“People just liked the ad,” Huffman said. “It’s a sweet message of respect and love. The whole goal we had was a message of love. We were trying to love on rural America.”