Implicit in the discussion and consternation around vaccine hesitancy has been a wish: If only there were a message that could break through skepticism and persuade unvaccinated people to get their shots. What a world that would be.
But over the past year, this really did happen. While there are still too many holdouts, many people who were skeptical or hesitant changed their minds and got their Covid-19 shots.
A new study by Vincent Pons at the Harvard Business School and Vincenzo Galasso and Paola Profeta at Bocconi University in Milan may help explain why. They found that people can in fact be persuaded by the right message, offering new evidence about the best ways to reach skeptics. Separate analyses have identified other factors, such as seeing other people be safely vaccinated and hearing about the benefits of vaccines from doctors and loved ones.
This study assessed which messages were most effective in increasing people’s willingness to get vaccinated, lessons that could still help advance the goal of vaccinating more people against Covid-19. There is a range of vaccine skepticism — from people who wanted to wait and see before getting their own shots, to the people uncertain about booster shots, to the vaccinated parents of unvaccinated but eligible children. Successful messaging could help in winning them over and may be instructive for future public health campaigns as well.
Read more at Vox.