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There’s a Proven Public Health Strategy We Could Use to Encourage Vaccination

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There’s a Proven Public Health Strategy We Could Use to Encourage Vaccination

March 9, 2019

There’s a Proven Public Health Strategy We Could Use to Encourage Vaccination

A well-funded public health campaign focusing on the real-life health consequences of underimmunization could have an enormous impact. Images of children with the measles—febrile, splotchy, eyes red, congested and miserable—would grab more attention than any cheerfully sanitized infographic. Interviews with people suffering the long-term chronic consequences of the diseases routine immunizations prevent could highlight the complications we have the luxury of rarely encountering. Male infertility as a result of mumps infection. Brain swelling from the chicken pox. Infant death after infection with the flu virus. An ad simply showing 30 seconds of raw footage of a toddler with whooping cough—hacking and gasping and struggling to breathe—could turn the focus of fear away from the vaccines and toward the disease in a way that the sterile regurgitation of facts and recommendations never could.

Stronger messaging about the dangers of vaccine-preventable diseases wouldn’t make headway on income or geographic disadvantages, which are the top two barriers to accessing immunization services. However, such a public health campaign could increase the urgency with which people seek out this form of preventative care. We already know that patients will go to greater efforts—wait longer, travel farther distances, research alternate resources—when a health threat is perceived to be dire or the need for a certain service is felt to be high. While the larger societal issues that stand in the way of improving health care access overall are vast and will involve slow, incremental change and a large investment of resources, a well-endowed, unapologetically graphic anti-disease campaign in the model of “Tips From Former Smokers” could yield cost-effective results relatively rapidly.

Starkly clinical images might indeed be difficult to see, but they’d help the vaccine-hesitant fully understand what they’re opting into by forgoing immunization. And if those types of realistic medical images are simply too uncomfortable, too gruesome, or too tragic to witness, it may well encourage people not to re-create them with the choices they make for their own children.

The full Slate article can be viewed at this link.  

 

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