Behind its COVID-19 vaccination goal, Joe Biden’s administration is dispatching front-line officials across the country, designing niche ads and recruiting community organizers to convince those who haven’t gotten vaccinated.
The strategy looks like a political campaign. But the message has to do with public health, not with ideology. The target is a group that health authorities call the “mobile environment”: some 55 million adults, many of them under 30, who could be convinced to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.
“There will not only be mass vaccination sites,” said the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra. “It will be from door to door. With mobile clinics, in the church, the hairdresser, the grocery store ”.
Authorities are seizing on a new topic of conversation: the delta variant that is most contagious and plagues India is spreading in the United States. This variant now represents almost 1 in 5 samples of confirmed cases in the country and many of those infected are young and unvaccinated.
The White House is sending its top names to push the campaign forward.
President Biden visited a mobile vaccination site in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Thursday. Hours earlier, First Lady Jill Biden held the hand of a woman at a vaccination site in Kissimmee, Florida.
Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, has visited at least 19 states by his count.
The administration has also recruited celebrities and athletes, including country music star Brad Paisley and the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team.
It has partnered with Twitch and Riot Games to reach gamers online and with Panera and Chipotle to offer free food to injectors.
It is not clear how well the promotion strategy is working. Vaccination rates have fallen below 1 million a day and there are still no signs of change.
The government has already recognized that it will not meet Biden’s goal of vaccinating 70% of adults by July 4, when the country celebrates Independence Day.
To date, about 170 million American adults have received at least one vaccine.
An analysis by The Associated Press suggests that Biden’s goal may be reached through the end of July at current vaccination rates.
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