Federal Communication About the COVID-19 Vaccine: Missed Opportunities to Counter Health Skepticism
By Margaret Tait
COVID-19 cases continue to impact our communities while public attitudes about the vaccine to protect against COVID remain mixed. This is due in part to shifting guidance from the federal government about vaccine eligibility and rising levels of health skepticism, or mistrust or doubt in the ability of medical care and related institutions to improve health. Public health leaders, researchers and communicators face urgent questions of what can be done to mitigate health skepticism, as well as what could have been done to prevent this rise.
In 2021, members of our team conducted a content analysis of federally-sponsored public service announcements (PSAs) about COVID-19. Our goals were to understand the messages that were used to stop the spread of COVID-19 and to see what, if any, appeals were used to highlight the potential with the vaccine. There were no PSAs in our sample of content that aired from mid-March – mid-December of 2020 that mentioned the vaccine. To our team, this was the first missed opportunity to convey information about the vaccine that may promote trust in its efficacy and encourage uptake. In effect, sharing content about the vaccine ahead of its release could have mitigated health skepticism.
Building on what we learned – and inspired by what we had yet to observe in federally-sponsored PSAs – we completed a separate analysis of the period immediately following, to include federally-sponsored PSAs aired from mid-December through the end of June 2021. This work was just published in Preventive Medicine Reports. We focused on explicit appeals to get vaccinated, broadly conceptualized to include any message that may be perceived as direct encouragement to get vaccinated, such as a message to “get the shot”. Additionally, we analyzed PSAs for additional content about the vaccine, including that it was free and safe and effective. Fewer than twenty percent (17.1%) of PSAs in our sample included messages encouraging vaccination and just over a quarter (25.5%) included messages about the safety or effectiveness of the vaccine. Considering the potential for federally-sponsored content to promote trust in and encourage uptake of the vaccine, these findings were disappointing.
Our efforts also contributed key insights worth sharing with public health researchers and practitioners invested in health equity. The first underscores the importance of local messengers and messages: absent key content about the vaccine in federally-sponsored guidance, local public health organizations have a key role relaying critical public health information. And second, while these results may explain in part why attitudes about the vaccine are mixed and health skepticism is on the rise, they also implore us to continue to consider available media and messaging and identify effective strategies for reducing the deleterious effects of health skepticism.
Read more related work from the COMM team:
- Analysis of COVID-19 PSA airings in 2020 and their association with communities political orientation
- Data on partisan differences in public perceptions of disparities in COVID-19
- Insights into public sentiment at the end of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency
- A study on local TV news coverage of controversy over masks during COVID-19
This post was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (Grant no. 79754). The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.