https://debeaumont.org/news/2021/focus-group-vaccines-republicans/
Key takeaways included:
- Politicians are ineffective messengers — the mistrust of government and political leaders is significant, so it’s important to decouple science and politics.
- Unknown side effects are a major concern.
- Good stories help.
- The ability to travel is a strong motivator for getting a vaccine.
- These participants were more interested in facts and data than emotional arguments — and they don’t want to be told what to do. As one of them said, “We want to be educated, not indoctrinated.”
Hearing simple facts from Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC. Here are his five facts:
- If you get infected with the virus, it will go all over your body and stay there for at least a week and be much more likely to cause you long-term problems than the vaccine.
- If you get the vaccine, it will prime your immune system, but then the vaccine is gone. It will not be with you anymore.
- More than 90% of the doctors who have been offered this vaccine have chosen to get it.
- The more we vaccinate, the faster we can get back to growing our economy and doing the things we want to do.
- If people get vaccinated, we’re going to save at least 100,000 lives of Americans who would otherwise be killed by COVID.