“This will not be easy,” said White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients during a briefing this week. “Vaccinating everyone in America is one of the biggest operational challenges we’ve faced.”
The White House has yet to launch a major national advertising campaign promoting the vaccination campaign, and regional and local outreach plans remain a work in progress. The promised Covid-19 Vaccinations Collaborative, dedicated to sharing information and best practices with states, localities and tribes, has not yet been made public.
There have been no new messaging initiatives in the Department of Health and Human Services since the Trump administration last fall put Weber in charge of a $ 250 million advertising campaign – after discarding a heavily scrutinized celebrity component that aims to “defeat despair “about the pandemic.
And while President and First Lady Jill Biden appears in a recorded message before Sunday’s Super Bowl, the commercial should focus primarily on the work of frontline health workers. The most explicit effort to promote Covid’s vaccines during the big game will come from outside the government, with the non-profit organization Ad Council and the COVID Collaborative initiative running a 90-second commercial financed by Budweiser.
“We are very aware of the issue of supply and demand, but we also know that we have to get there with an educational effort,” said John Bridgeland, a former senior White House employee of George W. Bush and co-founder of the COVID Collaborative, a independent initiative created to help states and localities to coordinate their responses to the pandemic.
“We are trying to push knowledge, understanding and confidence, so that, when available, you have a lot of access to many messages,” added Bridgeland, who has been in regular contact with the Biden team in Covid messages.
Nearly 30 million Americans have received at least one dose of any of the available two-dose regimens, with the rate of vaccination gradually increasing to almost 1.3 million doses per day. The administration is increasing vaccine shipments to states by about 20% in the next three weeks, but federal authorities have limited tools to increase supplies.
How quickly the government can increase its stockpile will determine the timing of its awareness campaign, while officials remain cautious about launching a major vaccine boost before it can handle the expected increase.
In a sharp departure from the Trump era, Biden officials and others involved in the discussions said the government is eager to play a central role in coordinating the pandemic’s messages – and that its deliberate start was largely motivated by a sense of caution.
Although former President Donald Trump often stepped forward from his own government’s formal policy announcements, exaggerated the effectiveness of his response to the pandemic and expressed the crisis in partisan terms, Biden’s team emphasized restraint in particular – cautious to commit mistakes that could end up damaging public confidence.
This danger gained particular focus after Trump and Biden officials in early January signaled plans to expand access to the vaccine to a broader population of older Americans, only to have the demand for vaccines far exceed supply. available.
“Before the opening, people didn’t seem to have that concern because demand was still very low, or low enough,” said Loyce Pace, who served on the Covid-19 advisory board for the Biden transition and is executive director of the Global Health Council. “Suddenly, poof, a lot more people seem to really want this vaccine.”
Biden’s Covid-19 team also took a delicate approach to pandemic policy and discussed extensively how to reach communities of color and other underserved areas, where people may be more reluctant to try or have more difficulty accessing it. Initial data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week showed that blacks and Latinos are being vaccinated at much lower rates than whites.
Among the ideas that officials have raised is the need to recruit a variety of so-called ambassadors to take the government’s message about the vaccine to specific communities where they have credibility, said three people familiar with the discussions. The administration is also looking to send Vice President Kamala Harris to encourage vaccination in black communities.
Other ambassadors may include prominent members of the community, celebrities, athletes or business leaders – although a person familiar with the concept has said that research so far shows that doctors and nurses are the most effective spokespersons, especially when it comes to reaching people by heart.
“We are talking about people’s feelings about the safety and efficacy of these vaccines,” said Cameron Webb, the White House’s senior policy advisor for Covid-19’s heritage. “And I think there’s a lot of work to be done to build that trust – that’s the idea of trustworthy messengers delivering trustworthy messages.”
Meanwhile, health officials have explored the use of government programs to target specific audiences, said Weber. This could include recruiting employees who run Head Start programs, which serve low-income families with young children, to disseminate information about the vaccination effort.
The pandemic awareness plan initiated by the Trump administration still has at least $ 115 million of its initial $ 250 million allocation. The vast majority of the remaining dollars will eventually be dedicated to advertising campaigns that promote vaccination, as well as other public health measures.
The Biden government’s ambitions for a broader campaign may be limited by Congress, which would need to take over much of the $ 1 billion that Biden officials originally envisaged as part of Covid’s next relief bill.
In the interim, the White House worked closely with the COVID Collaborative and the Ad Council, which separately raised $ 50 million for its own vaccine awareness initiative and met regularly with Biden officials to refine its message.
But Biden officials and health experts said that within the government, the priority focus since the beginning has been simply to produce as much vaccine as possible – and to bet that the success of the response will be a snowball from there.
“The vaccine has to be available, people need access to it and then you bring your advertising around that appeal,” said Weber. “Take this vaccine out and then we will be ready to launch.”