Communicating about vaccines: Illuminating the context for access and hesitancy [video]

Communicating about vaccines: Illuminating the context for access and hesitancy [video]

To boost vaccine rates, public health practitioners and advocates need more than just compelling messages; we also must confront the practical barriers that make it hard for some people to access the vaccine — and credible information about it. In this video, the second in a series from BMSG, we discuss the context for why vaccination rates are lagging in some communities. Learn more about COVID-related communication and view other videos at www.bmsg.org/covid-19.

Transcript

[NARRATOR]: There’s no shortage of news about COVID-19 vaccination rates. Stories about state and national rankings, pockets of vaccine hesitancy, and the health consequences of being unvaccinated routinely make headlines. Less common are stories that make visible the context for whether people can easily access the vaccine and credible information about it. BMSG’s research team has gained insight into what’s missing from conversations surrounding vaccination, after studying news coverage of the issue.

[PAMELA MEJIA, BMSG HEAD OF RESEARCH]: One of my favorite quotes that came from the research that we did was from a physician who talked about vaccine deserts. So, these are places where access to vaccination sites is very, very limited: There might be very few of them; they might have limited hours, limited staff; they might be difficult to access via public transportation; they might be difficult to access financially.

Communities that have been marginalized and tend to be ignored for things like healthy food, for health care facilities, etc., they also tend to be ignored and left out of access to vaccination sites. As advocates and practitioners — as people who want to increase rates of vaccination — we have to illustrate for folks that sometimes many people want to be vaccinated, but they simply can’t.

[NARRATOR]: Although stories illustrating access issues are relatively rare, our researchers did find some good examples. In this article from The Washington Post, the executive director of the American Public Health Association explains why it’s important to expand coverage in ways that highlight practical barriers. He says, quote, “If you’ve got to take two buses and walk a few blocks, plus hesitancy, where is the incentive to go get that shot?”

Another factor hindering vaccination rates is a lack of access to trustworthy information about it.

[PAMELA MEJIA, BMSG HEAD OF RESEARCH]: There is a long history of misinformation and disinformation from vaccine-hesitant or vaccine-skeptical folks. It’s interesting that they — that vaccine opponents tend to sow a lot of distrust of medical science and medical professionals because, at the same time, they try to evoke or mimic medical professionals and medical work.

When we were doing our analysis of documents, we found a number of fact sheets from organizations like the CDC, and we also found fact sheets that looked almost identical in terms of their layout, their formatting, some of their language choices, etc., but they came from vaccine-hesitant or vaccine-skeptical organizations.

There’s no way of knowing what the individual media environment or messaging environment somebody’s been exposed to is, which makes it doubly important that we be reflective of and acknowledge access issues, and, you know, really be prepared to talk about some of the uncomfortable questions that people may have. We need each other’s help in figuring out where to go and where to ask questions and what information to trust when it comes to vaccinations.

Look at who’s providing the information — whether it’s from a reputable source or not. If data is being cited, is it coming from a reputable place, or, um, is it sourced at all? If data is presented without a citation, that’s a sign that this might not be a very good source. And look at the timeliness; look at how current the information that’s being presented is.

Establishing that there are questions, there is competing information, that there can be a lot of confusing and conflicting information in the world is an important step towards making people feel heard. It’s kind of a way of acknowledging our shared humanity.

For more tips on communicating effectively about COVID-19 and vaccines, visit bmsg.org/covid-19.