An Urgent Plea to Philanthropy: Help Us Persuade People to Take the Covid-19 Vaccine

We should all celebrate the extraordinary news this week that highly effective vaccines for Covid-19 may be available to some people as early as next month. It’s been a long time since Americans could be 95 percent certain about, well, anything.

But with this joyful news, health officials face another urgent problem: Nearly half of Americans surveyed by Pew Research Center in September said they won’t take a Covid-19 vaccine.

While vaccine confidence has crept up slightly in response to the high success rates of the new Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, there’s still a massive gap between the number of people who say they will take a vaccine and the numbers needed to achieve herd immunity to Covid-19. That number differs by disease, but has ranged from 80 to 85 percent of the population for polio to 90 to 95 percent for measles.

Billions of dollars were invested in developing these vaccines, but they won’t protect us unless they are broadly accepted and taken. A widespread public communications effort is urgently needed to change minds about the vaccine. We have a tool that can help, but we will need philanthropic support to put it into practice.

Collaborating with16 scholars from the disciplines of behavioral economics, social psychology, medical anthropology, political communication, and neuroscience on behalf of the United Nations Verified initiative, we developed a research-driven communication framework for decreasing vaccine hesitancy. Our findings suggest that we must do more than accurately convey the scientific facts about the effectiveness of vaccines, mask wearing, hand washing, and distancing.

Our eight-part framework offers these guidelines for creating an effective communications strategy:

• Consider people’s identities, worldviews, and moral values, all of which affect the information they’re willing to accept.
• Act quickly to get the message out since people are most likely to trust and stick to the version of information they hear first.
• Use trusted messengers such as scientists and doctors.
• Make sure messages are concrete, consistent, built around narrative, and provide value.
• Make the vaccine-trials process more transparent, and tell stories of people who have participated.
• Appeal to positive emotions like pride and parental love rather than shame, fear, and guilt.
• Recognize that communities have different relationships with vaccinations, and design communications strategies with that in mind.
• Recognize that peoples’ perceptions about the choices made by individuals like them will affect whether they decide to take a vaccine.

We’re proud of this communications framework. But a science-based communications strategy is much like a vaccine — just as vaccines require testing, trials, and widespread adoption, so do promising tools like this one.

Philanthropy can play an essential role in testing and promoting effective communications about the necessity of the Covid-19 vaccine by funding the rapid deployment of large-scale surveys, seeking input from scholars around the world who can offer culturally appropriate insights, and investing in strategies that translate this research into meaningful, actionable, and trustworthy messages targeted to specific communities.

The scholars who participated in this effort are well prepared to conduct the research and get the insights we need. The Center for Public Interest Communications is one of many poised to coordinate and translate those efforts into the coaching and training that health experts and practitioners will need to apply the framework to their own work.

Journalism education organizations such as Poynter and Nieman Lab could provide training to journalists and editors to help them avoid reporting missteps that could lead to vaccine hesitance.

We urgently need to establish partnerships among scholars and practitioners in public health, medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, and communications. All of us need investments in infrastructure to meet the demand. Communications in the nonprofit world is chronically and systemically underfunded, and yet we have never needed it more.

Our preliminary findings already show that this vaccine is viewed differently from other vaccines. An initial survey we conducted with 1,600 respondents across Britain, France, Germany, and the United States shows that people see the Covid-19 vaccine as politically charged, lack trust in the information about it, and are highly concerned about potential side effects.

We need to act quickly to avoid another generation of vaccine hesitancy and reach herd immunity for this deadly disease. We are scholars, but the question of how to overcome vaccine hesitancy is not academic. The answers live in the research.

Emily K. Brunson
Associate Professor and Associate Chair
Department of Anthropology
Texas State University

Kurt Gray
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jonathan Kennedy
Senior Lecturer
Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry
Queen Mary University of London

Monica Schoch-Spana
Senior Scholar
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health

Ann Searight Christiano
Director
Center for Public Interest Communications
University of Florida

Jack Barry
Postdoc
Center for Public Interest Communications
University of Florida