“It will not be easy,” White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients said during a briefing this week. “Vaccinating everyone in America is one of the biggest operational challenges we have ever faced.”
The White House has launched another major national advertising campaign to promote vaccination, and regional and local outreach plans remain a work in progress. A promised Covid-19 vaccination collaboration dedicated to sharing information and best practices with states, communities and tribes has not yet been announced.
There have been no new messaging initiatives at the Department of Health and Human Services yet, as the Trump administration last fall put Weber at the helm of a $ 250 million advertising campaign – after deleting an extremely thorough celebrity component that aimed at “defeating despair” over the pandemic.
And while President and First Lady Jill Biden appears in a recorded message ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl, it’s expected to focus largely on the work of frontline health professionals. Rather, the most explicit attempt to promote Covid vaccines during the big game comes from outside the government, with the nonprofit advertising board and the COVID Collaborative initiative broadcasting a 90-second ad that was bankrolled by Budweiser.
“We’re very aware of supply and demand, but we also know we need to get there with an educational effort,” said John Bridgeland, a former senior official of the George W. Bush White House and co-founder of the COVID Collaborative , an independent initiative created to help states and localities coordinate their pandemic responses.
“We try to strengthen knowledge and understanding and increase self-confidence so that, if available, you have had a lot of access to a lot of messages,” added Bridgeland, who was in regular contact with the Biden team. on Covid messages.
Nearly 30 million Americans received at least one dose of the available two-shot regimens, with the vaccination rate gradually rising to nearly 1.3 million shots per day. The administration will increase vaccines to states by about 20 percent over the next three weeks, but federal officials have limited tools to increase supply.
How quickly the administration can build up its inventory will determine the timing of its awareness campaign, while officials remain cautious about launching a major vaccine push before they can handle the expected boom.
In a stark departure from the Trump era, Biden officials and others involved in the talks said the government was keen to play a key role in coordinating pandemic messages – and that the deliberate start was largely off a sense of caution was driven.
While former President Donald Trump often made the formal policy announcements of his own government, exaggerating the effectiveness of his pandemic response and exerting the crisis in biased terms, Biden’s team privately emphasized reticence – careful to make erroneous mistakes that may ultimately prejudice the confidence of the public.
This danger came into play especially after both Trump and Biden officials announced plans in early January to expand access to vaccines to a wider population of older Americans, just to surpass the demand for the shots.
“Before the inauguration, people apparently did not have that concern because the demand was still so low or low enough,” said Loyce Pace, who served on the Biden Transition Covid-19 advisory board and executive director of the Global Health is. Council. “Suddenly, poof, it seems like a lot more people really want this vaccine.”
Biden’s Covid-19 team also took a delicate approach to the politics of the pandemic and discussed in detail how to reach color communities and other underserved areas where people are more reluctant to take a chance or have more difficult access to it. to get. Initial data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week showed that blacks and Latinos are being vaccinated at lower prices than whites.
Three people familiar with the discussions say among the ideas that have driven officials is the need to call in a variety of so-called ambassadors to take the government’s vaccine message to specific communities. The government also wants to deploy Vice President Kamala Harris to encourage vaccinations in colored communities.
Other ambassadors may include prominent members of the community, celebrities, athletes or business leaders, although one 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 of color.
“We’re talking about people’s feelings about the safety and efficacy of these vaccines,” said Cameron Webb, senior policy adviser to the Covid-19 Equity. “And I think there’s a lot of work to do to build trust – it’s the idea of trusted messengers giving reliable messages.”
Health officials, meanwhile, have been investigating the use of government programs to reach specific audiences, Weber said. This may include recruiting staff who run Head Start programs, which serve low-income families with young children, to disseminate information about the vaccination effort.
The Trump administration’s pandemic awareness plan still has at least $ 115 million left over from its initial $ 250 million allocation. The vast majority of the remaining dollars will eventually be devoted to advertising campaigns that promote vaccinations, as well as other public health measures.
The Biden government’s ambition for a broader campaign could be curtailed by Congress, which had to apply much of the $ 1 billion originally envisaged by Biden officials to Covid legal aid as part of the next bill .
In the meantime, the White House has worked closely with the COVID Collaborative and the Ad Council, who have raised $ 50 million separately for their own vaccine awareness initiative and have met regularly with Biden officials to refine the message.
But Biden officials and health experts said that within the administration, the main focus early on was to produce as much vaccine as possible – and to bet the success of the response, it would snowball from there.
“The vaccine has to be available, people have to have access to it, and then you bring your ad around the attraction,” Weber said. “Get the vaccine out there, then we’m ready to roll.”