In World Vs Delta, Tests Reveal How Nations Respond To Vaccine Messaging

Coronavirus Vaccine: United Nations Children's Fund, The Public Good Projects and the Yale Institute for Global Health have partnered to create the Vaccine Demand Observatory.

Public-health researchers seeking new ways to persuade vaccine holdouts to take coronavirus shots are turning to the strategies of the digital marketing industry to figure out how to win over the reluctant.

Companies that use online ads to sell products try out various colors, phrases, typefaces and a whole host of other variables to determine what resonates with consumers. So why not, the thinking goes, apply the same sort of A/B testing to figure out how best to promote vaccines?

To that end, the United Nations Children's Fund, The Public Good Projects and the Yale Institute for Global Health have partnered to create the Vaccine Demand Observatory, which is working with Facebook Inc. to help nations around the world fine-tune their appeals to better inspire vaccine confidence.

The work is critically important as the world grapples with the combined obstacles of the hyper-contagious delta variant, sluggish vaccine rollouts in some nations and plateauing uptake in others, and it's been given fresh impetus after Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech SE said this week that their Covid-19 vaccine was safe and effective in children ages 5 to 11, findings that could pave the way to begin vaccinating grade-school kids within months. Medical evidence makes clear that vaccines are safe and effective at both tamping down the spread of the virus and greatly decreasing the risk of hospitalization for those rare vaccinated individuals that do contract Covid. Yet, in the U.S., where vaccines are widely available, about 25% of eligible adults haven't taken their shots.