Biden Administration Announces Ad Campaign to Combat Vaccine Hesitancy

The full list of participating organizations includes health professionals, scientists, community organizations, faith leaders, businesses, rural stakeholders, civil rights organizations, sports leagues and athletes. The Department of Health and Human Services is also joining the vaccine education effort with the release of frames with the slogan “Let’s Get Vaccinated” that Facebook users can attach to their profile photographs.

Part of the challenge of persuading skeptical Americans are the personal and varied reasons for vaccine hesitancy.

“I’ve got some pockets where they cite religious reasons with the Johnson Johnson vaccine,” said Shirley Bloomfield, the chief executive of N.T.C.A. — The Rural Broadband Association, who has been sharing with the White House what she hears from her group’s members. “There are a lot of pockets where people have already had Covid and a sense of, ‘Well, we’ve all already gotten it, so we’re not really pressed.’”

The advertisements are hopeful in tone and are intended as a call to action, saying that everyone can play a part in ending the pandemic by getting vaccinated.

To press that point even more, the Department of Health and Human Services has separately bought a multimillion-dollar ad in Black and Spanish-language media, as well as in outlets that reach Asian-Americans and tribal communities, reinforcing the message about the safety and efficacy of coronavirus vaccines.

The administration announced last week that it was allocating close to $10 billion to increase vaccine access and confidence in minority communities that have been hardest hit by the pandemic.

Biden officials have been working with many of the groups involved in the Covid-19 Community Corps since the presidential transition, but the formal rollout of a promotional campaign had to wait, they said, until the vaccine supply was at a level where people could quickly act on the information provided to them.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/us/politics/coronavirus-vaccine-hesitancy.html