Last fall, a group of researchers carried out an experiment: they showed millions of YouTube users in the United States an ad that highlighted Donald Trump’s support for Covid-19 vaccines, using recordings of newscasts in which the ex-president asked people to get immunized.
It was a randomized control trial, comparing counties exposed to the ads with others that weren’t, and in a new work the researchers say the ads worked: During the two-and-a-half-week experiment, the 1,014 counties that participated in the campaign had 104,036 over-vaccinations in general, according to estimates.
As with all studies, these results should be viewed with caution, but they address a key question as the US emerges — as we hope — from the worst moment of the Covid era, but also approaches 1 million deaths: how much more could have been done to combat indecision about vaccines, and how much more could Republican hesitation about vaccines, especially, have been overcome?
This question is more acute for conservatives, and we’ll get to the right’s responsibility in a moment. But it’s important for progressives too, because such a government has been running the country through most of the vaccination era, and a strongly progressive public health system has been responsible for figuring out how to reach the unvaccinated.
Communicating across a polarized environment is a difficult task, and some degree of failure was inevitable. But when it became clear that Republican resistance to the vaccine was going to be a problem, it appeared that the authorities had only two reactions: mandatory and critical, trying to force people to take the shots, and complaining about misinformation when they didn’t.
But the ad experiment, the apparent effectiveness of simply pointing out Trump’s pro-vaccine rhetoric to receptive audiences, is an example of a different kind of creativity. Republican skepticism was hardly monolithic: most Republicans were vaccinated; many prominent conservatives — politicians, Fox News figures and others — called for people to take it; and many figures on the right insisted that they were in favor of the vaccine, but against making it mandatory.
All of this could have been material for more Republican-friendly, and therefore more convincing, forms of advertising and communication than the Biden administration ultimately produced, focused on enforcement and disinformation.
At least that’s what I tend to think. But in the end it was the Republicans themselves (officials, media personalities, Trump) who had the best opportunity to communicate with their undecided supporters about the vaccine, to cut advertisements and suspend events and in other ways break the most understandable forms of distrust. and with sincere reasons. And so it is in conservatism that the failure of the last year has become clearest.
The best way to understand failure is to connect it to the things that conservatives got right, at least in part, over the course of 2020 and 2021. In particular, as we look at the pandemic era, right-wing doubts about different mitigation strategies —mandatory wearing of masks, school closures, lockdowns, social distancing—now have a certain amount of data to back them up.
For example, there was a lot of talk during 2020 that republican states, which reopened quickly, were killing their inhabitants, while blue states were protecting them. But, as my colleague David Leonhardt pointed out, “By the end of Covid’s first year in the US, the virus had swept across the country and there was no significant partisan divide in deaths.”
More recently, when the onomicron ravaged the country, he commented that it was difficult to discern a clear difference in infection rates between progressive and conservative counties, even though liberal areas were still implementing more mitigation measures.
Or, coming out of the US: A study published last month in The Lancet that examined excess deaths worldwide in the Covid era found that two European countries often criticized for being negligent compared to their neighbors, Sweden and Great Britain. Britain, have not fared notably worse than their peers.
These trends are suggestive; they do not mean that all non-pharmaceutical interventions were useless. But they imply that they were generally exaggerated, their scientific underpinnings emphasized at the expense of reasonable doubt.
Combine that reality with the clear harms of some interventions, especially school closures, and you arrive at the pattern of facts that turned a figure like Ron DeSantis into a conservative folk hero for resisting many of these measures.
But then, from this pattern of facts, the right drew the wrong conclusions for the vaccine phase of the Covid era. The most far-reaching erroneous conclusion was one drawn by outright anti-vaccine people—that if public health officials had exaggerated the benefits and minimized the costs when they promoted non-pharmaceutical interventions, we should assume that they were wildly exaggerating the benefits and hiding some even greater cost in the process. promote vaccines.
But even conservatives who weren’t outright opposed to the vaccine often seemed to see immunization as a fait accompli, treating it as a purely individual decision and turning most of their shots at the risks of the next round of public health spending.
Those risks existed, especially in the blue, Democratic US — but vaccines were so much more effective at preventing deaths than most of the more common non-pharmaceutical interventions that many conservative leaders ended up unhinged, saving their enthusiasm to oppose anything progressives did. wanted to do later.
A figure like DeSantis exemplified this problem. He made a big initial push for immunization in Florida, but he was clearly far more comfortable pushing against mandates than being a permanent salesman of the vaccines that part of his core constituency resisted.
And that was a problem because he, precisely because of the credibility he had built by resisting the excesses of public health before, was the best possible salesman in Florida — and not just there — other than Donald Trump.
The fact that he was anti-vaccine was not enough: precisely because the red (republican) USA was more resistant than the blue ones, it was necessary that its leaders touted the vaccine not only at the beginning, but also during the delta and omicron waves.
But a study that used Trump videos to sell vaccinations to over 100,000 Americans at least fits with what I think we saw in 2021. Much vaccine resistance, not just on the right, was more contingent and malleable than suggested the narratives about the tight march of the anti-vaccination group. And she might have been more open to old-fashioned persuasion, had they used the right persuasion.
