‘It’s Up to You’: Ad campaign to encourage coronavirus vaccination gets underway - The Washington Post

For tens of millions of Americans still unsure about taking coronavirus vaccine shots, advertising industry experts and government scientists have a new message: “It’s Up to You.”.

The campaign — the first concerted effort urging Americans to get vaccinated against the novel coronavirus — will further encourage those skeptical of the vaccines to visit a new website, getvaccineanswers.org, for the latest information on the safety and availability of vaccines.

The campaign was overseen by the Ad Council — the nonprofit communications industry group responsible for landmark ads such as Smokey Bear and famous public health messages including “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” — which has billed “It’s Up to You” as one of the largest public education efforts in U.S.

Experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention closely consulted on the campaign, which was announced in November as the first coronavirus vaccines were nearing release.

The goal of the campaign is to win over skeptical Americans, whose numbers are considered likely to be the difference between enough people being vaccinated and failing to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.

According to a recent AP/NORC poll, about 1 in 3 Americans said they definitely would not or probably would not get the coronavirus vaccine.

The poll showed that 57 percent of Black Americans said they have received or planned to get the vaccine, compared with 65 percent of Hispanic Americans and 68 percent of White Americans.

Government regulators have authorized a pair of vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, with President Biden vowing that the United States will have sufficient vaccine supply to inoculate 300 million people by July.

Researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation asked more than 1,000 Americans about their vaccination plans, finding that about one-third of adults would “wait and see” about getting a vaccine and that 13 percent would “definitely not” get vaccinated.

“There’s a lot of information that could be conveyed to those people to help them make good decisions for themselves,” said KFF’s Liz Hamel, who has helped to lead the organization’s coronavirus public opinion surveys.

The group also said that officials should avoid terms like “Operation Warp Speed” and “Emergency Use Authorization” — references, respectively, to the Trump administration’s push to speed vaccine development and to the regulatory approval given to the resulting vaccines — and instead say that the vaccines were “authorized by FDA based on clinical testing.”.

When the campaign was announced in November, the Ad Council said the drive would “complement government efforts,” but a $300 million ad blitz planned under Trump never materialized amid scrutiny of how political appointees in the administration were shaping the campaign?

Meanwhile, President Biden’s plan to launch government-backed pro-vaccine ads — which the administration billed in January as an “unprecedented public campaign that builds trust around vaccination” — are still several weeks away from being finalized, said three officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an in-progress effort.