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In Philadelphia, public health officials think block captains may be more effective than football stars in persuading people to get coronavirus vaccines.
Researchers in the Navajo Nation anticipate that directives about the shots will have to be reworded to resonate with Native people.
And in Atlanta, where a federally funded project has been working with community leaders to increase minority participation in clinical trials, physicians have a lesson to learn in how to talk to patients about vaccines.
Memo to docs? More empathy. Less authority.
These messaging strategies are aimed at winning over vaccine fence-sitters in much the way political campaigns target would-be voters. But in the life-or-death battle against the coronavirus, as much as 70% of the population must roll up their sleeves in the next few months to achieve herd immunity and stop the virus’s spread. And, unlike well-oiled political machines, public health officials say they are having to quickly rethink communications strategies that have long been hampered by a lack of funding. At this politically charged moment, they also face the formidable obstacles of introducing a new product to people who distrust science and are receiving competing narratives from anti-vaccination campaigns, which were seeding doubt in coronavirus shots before they were even developed.