Vaccine advocacy drops the ball on simple marketing.
Our vaccine strategy since the start of the pandemic has been this series of own goals, unforced errors, and failures. I’ve been complaining about this since the start of the pandemic that all the words and all the pictures around vaccinations are all wrong, always focused right in on the needles. Why? Because evoking bad emotions drives clicks maybe? But it’s counter productive and therefore I believe any media doing this ought to be shamed as anti-vax. Especially if it’s a medical outlet.
If you ever notice that the lasik ads on billboards, tv, or even the spoken ones on podcasts – they never ever mention the mechanics of EYE SURGERY. Obviously, they only mention the RESULTS. They’re not saying they’re gonna poke your eye! They tell you you can ditch your glasses.
So if you want to promote vaccination you don’t show kids being held down and jabbed with a needle, you talk about how they’re not getting measles, or covid, or whatever, you mention how bad the disease is, how good the protection is, and you don’t show the damn needles. It’s only helping the anti-vaxxers with their propaganda when the focus is on the needles instead of the results. Anti-vax proponents leverage the very common fear of needles. There may also be unnecessary fears of the injection or medications broadly, and even if irrational or unwarranted, those emotions are still real. And we know this is how they operate because they constantly refer to them as “injections” repeatedly, and referring to them as injections is a right-wing anti-vax buzzword.. An anti-vax activist who spoke in the public comments segment of the FDA VRBPAC meeting kept repeatedly calling them “injections”… And Walker Bragman reported that the Republican Senator Ron Johnson admitted why he uses the “injections” buzzword, basically because it sounds scary and bad.
So anyone wanting to promote vaccination should use common sense advertising and focus on all the benefits, and the real downsides of not getting vaccinated.