It’s vital to put faces to the vaccine of COVID-19
As the world gradually undergoes the COVID-19 vaccine, Corporate Reputation Practice managing director Peter Roberts says its story relies just as much on the human element as the scientific.
The vaccines are coming. More precisely, COVID-19 vaccinations are already being administered in large parts of the world at varying speeds, while it will be March before the Australian Federal Government have their needles at the ready.
The exercise is a mammoth communications exercise, which is made harder by the determined levels of suspicion levelled at the idea of vaccinating. Way before COVID-19 became the viral poster child, the World Health Organisation listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the biggest threats to global health. The COVID-19 conspiracy chorus, fed by a ragbag of intransigent celebrities has done nothing to soothe the situation. To that end, a recent survey by the Associated Press found that a quarter of US adults “weren’t sure” if they wanted to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Granted, the picture in Australia is far less recalcitrant, but the reality is there are people who have misgivings about vaccinating, whether that is borne of fear or ideology, which brings me to my argument.
It’s the people, stupid, or in campaign terms, if you want ‘em to vaccinate, tell ‘em about the people who made it. Scientific and medical breakthroughs have always been about the people, whether it’s Fleming and penicillin; Christiaan Barnard and his hearts, or Crick and Watson and DNA. As an audience, we can relate to these individual stories and so they become memorable. Their efforts talk to attributes which the rest of us crave – tenacity, wisdom, and inventiveness. We go as far as holding them up to our children as emblems of hard work and possibility – “look what you can achieve if you try hard enough!”.
