WASHINGTON — The White House is planning to launch a major paid media campaign aimed at convincing reluctant Americans — notably Black and Latino Americans — to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
President Joe Biden’s aides are working closely with Debra Fraser-Howze, the founder of the nonprofit group Choose Healthy Life, and the Black Coalition Against COVID-19, which includes academic, civil rights and faith-based organizations, to develop ads and other messaging geared toward specific segments of Americans who are getting vaccinated at lower rates, including those in the Black, Latino and Hasidic Jewish communities.
The move represents a shift in focus for the Biden administration’s ongoing public education campaign from basic coronavirus prevention measures to combating vaccine skepticism in underserved populations as they seek to reach their goal of making vaccines accessible to all Americans by May 1.
“They’re looking at all of them. And where there is hesitancy, they understand that they have to take a scientific approach and a cultural approach,” said Fraser-Howze, who served on former President Bill Clinton’s advisory council on HIV/AIDS. “They are partnering with people that they feel can meld those two approaches, so that when they do do a massive rollout, that it’s intact, and we’re not going back to say we missed the mark, because we can’t afford to miss mark. We’re behind the eight ball.”
Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, who heads the White House COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, is leading the effort. Dr. Anthony Fauci has also been involved in discussions with communities of color about coronavirus vaccines, participants said.
Biden aides have said since late last year that the White House would be launching a public education campaign to encourage vaccine acceptance.
But access to the vaccine, especially in communities of color, has proved to be a significant problem, and sources familiar with the discussions said the White House did not want to prematurely generate demand until the vaccines became widely available.
Federal health officials now say the U.S. is on track to have enough supply for every adult American to be vaccinated in a little more than two months. Biden has said the milestone will be met by May 31, and that there is a “good chance” Americans will be able to safely gather in small groups by July 4.
But scaling access to the vaccine and convincing skeptics on the timeline that Biden laid out will still be an uphill climb, Black leaders say.
“All of the king’s horses and all of the queen’s men. All the king’s women and all the queen’s men,” said Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, of what it will take. “It is doable, but it’s going to take a tremendous amount of work.”
Morial said that the pressure is on cities, states, counties and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to set up as many vaccine sites as possible before May 1, when Biden said every adult in America would be eligible to receive a shot.
He added that tens of thousands of pop-up and community center sites will be needed to vaccinate the bulk of the U.S. population.
“I think you can overcome some trust issues with access. I think you can overcome some trust issues with information,” said Morial, whose organization is part of the Black Coalition Against COVID-19. “And I also think there’s peer acceptance. My family members, my friends, my coworkers are getting it, I may be more inclined to get it.”
The percentage of Black Americans who said they were unlikely to get vaccinated was a stark 49% last fall. But recent surveys taken have shown that vaccine hesitancy in the Black community has waned, and it is relatively similar among white and non-white Americans.
An NPR/PBS/Marist poll conducted this month found that 28% of white respondents did not plan to get vaccinated compared with 31% of non-white survey participants. Hesitancy was higher among Latinos (37%) and Republican men (49%) than Black Americans (25%).
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, said the members of Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, which he was a part of, sought to boost confidence by stressing in public appearances that vaccines approved by the FDA for emergency use were safe. He said they also ran ads in minority-focused news media.
“You’re not going to eliminate decades of skepticism. There’s no question about that,” Carson said. “The thing that probably is going to be the most helpful is just publicizing the results.”
White House officials said Biden’s COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force has been holding roundtables with people they have identified as “trusted messengers” in underserved communities, including faith and rural leaders, as it develops its vaccine confidence campaign.
“Some communities — because of a range of historical, as well as contemporary factors — are less inclined to believe that these vaccines are safe and effective, less inclined to trust the systems offering these vaccines, and less inclined to trust the government asking them to get vaccinated,” Nunez-Smith said during a news briefing by the White House COVID-19 Response Team this month. “So we still have some work to do to meet people where they are.”
Fraser-Howze said that Black pastors who are sharing vaccine information with their congregations have been particularly helpful in building vaccine confidence. Several high-profile faith leaders have also taken the vaccine publicly.
“I think that that has made a tremendous dent in the 65 and over community for Black communities and understanding that their pastors, the people that they respect and look up to, are willing to put themselves on the line,” Fraser-Howze said.
Al Sharpton is one of the ministers working with Fraser-Howze. He is co-chair of the Choose Healthy Life Black Clergy Action Plan and received his vaccine publicly. He has been pushing for more vaccine access in Black communities.
“They can escalate what they’re doing now,” Sharpton said of Biden’s timeframe for vaccinations. “Make it accessible and then have people in those communities tell people that we need to do this, we need to do it for the safety of our loved ones, take one for our families,” he added. “So it must be a parallel strategy of making accessibility a reality and at the same time have people directly deal with questions of hesitancy and skepticism.”
The White House dispatched Vice President Kamala Harris to a vaccination site in Florida to quell concerns about the vaccine.
After expressing skepticism about the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines that were developed quickly while Trump was president, Harris took both doses of the Moderna vaccine on camera after she and Biden were elected.
Carson said critical statements about vaccines contributed to vaccine hesitancy. He also said “absurd” conspiracy theories were unhelpful.
“People are hearing a lot of stuff that is not true,” Carson said. “You’ve got to be as persistent as the people who are presenting the rumors.”
Morial said a campaign that educates people on the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine is overdue.
“The public square has been filled with lies and misinformation,” Morial said. “But the public square has not been filled with enough, accurate information from trusted sources about the vaccine.”
