The Vaccine Results are Phenomenal. Let’s Start Acting Like It!
I’m not a doctor or a political analyst. I’m not a public health expert either.
What I am is a man with four decades of experience in public relations who, alongside countless colleagues, has watched this country learn to absorb, believe, and propagate lies. We saw that to dramatic effect on January 6, as armed insurrectionists nearly overthrew the government over their belief that, despite a lack of any evidence, the election had been maliciously stolen. But in a much quieter and vastly more consequential way, that same willful refusal to live on planet Earth has led to nearly 500,000 deaths — that’s twice as many American lives lost than in WWII and approaching as many lost over the four years of our cataclysmic civil war. This cannot be overstated, so much of that comes down to what has been communicated to the American people (especially those predisposed toward conspiracism) and how it has been communicated: from downplaying the pandemic, to wildly mixed messaging (especially early on) regarding masks, to inaccurate information on how the virus affects young and healthy people, to outright lies about the virus itself.
And as I said, communications just happens to be my area of expertise. So let me be blunt: this pandemic has been a neverending communications nightmare with the deadliest of consequences.
And now, on top of everything — apparently having learned nothing over the last year — we’re still getting in our own way with the vaccine rollout. How? We spent a year desperately hoping for a vaccine, and now that we have multiple options with spectacular results, the messaging is detrimentally underselling them. In what seems to be an attempt to ensure that those who have been vaccinated still remain diligent — wearing masks and socially distancing — the media, politicians, and experts have managed to make many feel weary and pessimistic about what is truly a wondrous achievement — the creation of multiple working vaccines in record time.
I completely understand the desire to manage expectations — it’s something I preach often to my clients — but “managing expectations” doesn’t mean being so negative that we effectively shoot ourselves in the foot as we’re rounding our last lap. Does the vaccine solve everything? Of course not. And we absolutely need to communicate the importance of fighting pandemic fatigue, social distancing, and wearing masks. But we need to communicate the positive as well. The fact is, nations that have been more successful in vaccinating their populations are starting to see encouraging results, with declines in new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
Yet the headlines predominately skew negative. What is to be made — by those of us without a background in epidemiology — of news stories talking about vaccine effectiveness being “only” some percent less than 100 or consternating over the loss of vaccine efficacy when it comes to the new variants? In actuality, those percentages count any infection, no matter how mild, as a failure. And what these headlines don’t say is that of the 75,000 people who were vaccinated in the research trials, there was not a single COVID-19 death. In fact, all five vaccines with public results have eliminated deaths and drastically reduced hospitalizations. In the Moderna and Pfizer research trials — which vaccinated 32,000 — there was only one severe case of COVID-19 reported. That is remarkable!
Speaking to the New York Times, Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are “essentially 100 percent effective against serious disease.” Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, said bluntly, “It’s going to save your life.”
That is what we need to be communicating right now.
The messaging here needs to be focused on the truth — not on hedging the facts in order to engineer a desired public behavior (i.e., underselling the vaccine because we’re worried people will abandon other critical safety measures). All this wavering actually does is create room for skepticism, lies, and conspiracy theories to propagate.
We finally have the vaccines. We must encourage people to use them. How successful we are in that effort will come down to what we communicate.
Getting our country vaccinated is going to be a massive undertaking. The logistics themselves are complicated enough and beyond my purview. But the messaging? We’ve been given a perfect pitch and we’re somehow whiffing it. The vaccines themselves are nothing short of phenomenal! A true testament to collective grit and brilliance. All we have to do is effectively communicate that fact. And we do so by embracing optimism (the best part is, it’s actually warranted!). The messaging surrounding the vaccine — especially with so many Americans skeptical and even hostile to vaccines in principle — is critical right now. We have to get this right. Lives are quite literally depending on it.
An understandable skepticism fanned both by fear of the virus itself and by a solid year of rosy deceits coming out of the White House, with a media afraid of seeming too biased in the present administration’s favor, has led to the disappointing decision to further stoke doubt. There is nothing to be gained from writing fraught stories focused on percentage points of efficacy that misconstrue the real truth: the vaccines work!
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines’ 95% efficacy rating isn’t a warning about being in the remaining 5% (which still saw zero deaths and very few hospitalizations) but a colossal triumph of modern medical science; in less than a year, we have multiple vaccines that rank among the most effective ever created (well beyond effective enough to end the pandemic). And almost absent from that discussion has been what happens when the vaccine “doesn’t work;” it turns COVID-19 into little more than a seasonal flu. That’s huge. That’s incredible news. Human ingenuity in the face of an ongoing crisis managed to take an eight-year process and do it in eight months, and not only that, but transform vaccine development itself in the process. What’s left is distribution and the all-critical public health messaging to get people in line for a poke.
So why is the news media shooting that effort in the foot?
We’re not out of the woods. Far from it. The message needs to be how important it is to get vaccinated, and to make sure it happens quickly as more infectious variants spread; to ramp up mask-wearing and hand-washing because you don’t slow down just as you’re finally overtaking the frontrunner, especially when you still have a few laps to go; and that this is our path back to something resembling normal, whatever that will turn out to be.
Tell them that, after they’re vaccinated, they can visit and hug their friends and families, and that they can dine in restaurants without fear, or see their grandchildren. It means a return to public life for the first time in a year or more. What it means, essentially, is freedom from the most onerous restrictions the pandemic forced on us. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but we won’t get there if we stop to stress about whether there may be some clouds in the sky once we emerge.
If there is any lesson from the last four years, it’s that words do indeed have consequences. How we speak and what we say matters. When it comes to the vaccines, it will have life-and-death consequences for millions of Americans.
Communications — the way I practice it — must be about the truth. But we do choose how we tell it — what facts to focus on, what the headline is, what tone we convey. And that determines what people actually hear. Right now, we need to make sure they hear optimism, hope, and the promise of the future we can have because of these remarkable vaccines.
