Communicating about vaccines: How to discuss racial equity in vaccine uptake
Wednesday, November 10, 2021To help ensure equitable vaccination rates in all neighborhoods, public health advocates and practitioners must center communities of color in their messages. Being silent on racism allows vaccine opponents to invoke medical oppression in their communication, stoking further division, hesitancy, and distrust. This video, the third in a series from BMSG, offers strategic communication tips for advancing racial and health equity in immunizations.
Transcript
[KIM GARCIA, BMSG RESEARCHER]: Communities of color have many reasons for having hesitancy around vaccines. Medical racism and medical oppression have been experienced and continue to be experienced by people of color. There’s also a lack of representation of providers — medical providers and even public health practitioners, who we see in our communities who may not look like us, and so there’s a barrier of trust that needs to be built when we don’t see ourselves or see our lived experiences represented.
[NARRATOR]: So, how do we go about building trust with community partners? For starters, public health advocates and practitioners cannot stay silent on racial inequity and the structures that create it.
[GARCIA]: To leave race out of the conversation is really leaving it up to vaccine opponents to take up that issue themselves. We found that vaccine opponents bring up instances of medical racism and medical oppression ultimately to undermine trust in the medical system. By using race to divide us, they’re turning us against each other, they’re turning us against medical providers and government overall.
[NARRATOR]: When advocates address racial equity in messages about vaccines, they must go beyond acknowledging past harms.
[SHADDAI MARTINEZ-CUESTAS, BMSG HEAD OF TRAINING]: Focusing on hesitancy has been a way to deflect responsibility for equitable distribution on the front end.
[NARRATOR]: To make sure their messages don’t reinforce hesitancy, advocates must also discuss structural barriers, many of which predate the pandemic.
[GARCIA]: Lack of health insurance, lack of transportation, lack of housing that gives someone a safe and stable place to even think about getting vaccinated in the first place. We know that, for example, even your zip code could be shaping your risk for exposure. We also we can talk about lack of protections that are in place for frontline and essential workers, who are predominantly people of color.
And so, that really points to someone in power who can put those protections in place. So, when we talk about the landscape, when we talk about the structures that can hinder people’s access to vaccines, we can then point to solutions that are structural and systemic solutions. Rather than “this person needs to be able to get a vaccine,” but, “how can we improve our structures and systems so that all people can get vaccines?”
[MARTINEZ-CUESTAS]: I want to point out an article by Politico that it is focusing on the systems instead of just blaming individuals. The chief medical executive of Minnesota has a really great quote in this article, talking about how the best public health happens when you go into neighborhoods and when you’re working with communities and how it is the duty and responsibility for public health to go to where their communities are at.
[NARRATOR]: Advocates can also advance equity by including values in their messages.
[GARCIA]: When we talk about vaccines, we’re really thinking about the greater good, our collective, our community. These are the values that we hold because we know that communities of color are being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. Vaccine opponents, on the other hand, tend to use a very individual frame; they really look at my personal choices, my personal freedoms. That creates greater division and, if we stay silent on racial equity from a public health side, vaccine opponents will only continue to stoke those divisions.