Some people feel that government health department messages to encourage vaccination can be too heavy-handed or negative for some people’s tastes.
In a recent post I discussed rubella infection and it’s impact in early pregnancy. The illustrations for that article feature a New York State program to encourage children to be vaccinated against rubella. While old-fashioned what struck me was the positive approach used, the ’rubella fighter’ cards and label buttons, and that the message was targeted at encouraging the children as much as (if not more than) the parents.
I’d like to throw readers a loose thought, or rather a or three. Would a similar strategy–adapted to modern tastes of course–be useful today? Would these complement the existing approaches? Would it even work? Perhaps today’s kids wouldn’t buy into it the same way?
Leave your thoughts in the comments below. (Note, also, that my blog still doesn’t require registration, so just tap away!)
(PS: I wonder if the adult ‘Andy’ who was vaccinated in November 1970–as the card he proudly shows off says–knows his young image is making it’s way around the world?)
Other posts that might interest readers on Code for life:
Rubella, not a benign disease if experienced during early pregnancy
Lancet formally retracts Wakesfield paper
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: $10B towards vaccines
Map shows New Zealand with lowest death rate on earth in 1856, over 11 in 1000 dying
Deleting a gene can turn an ovary into a testis in adult mammals
All this talk about 3-D movies and TVs is depressing
Scientific baking. Great for those lab meetings or kids’ parties
I suspect that today’s audience is too sophisticated for that kind of rah-rah approach – it’s like ads from the 1950s seem gauche and overdone to today’s consumers. The problem is that anything, whether positive or negative, seems automatically suspicious to the target audience (people ambivalent about vaccination) when it comes down from on high – see Mark Sainsbury’s quizzing Dr Stuart Jessamine on Close Up over where the funding for the Gardasil campaign came from, after the death of a young woman whose mother blames it on the vaccine. And Gardasil’s a pretty gentle and positive campaign.
Anecdotes are more persuasive than statistics to a general audience – I’m thinking something like “When I was a kid, we all got the measles – just being in the same room with someone was enough to catch it off them.. It was just one of those childhood diseases. Most of us got over it. But X was off school for weeks recovering. Y had to go to hospital. Z is blind as a result. There’s no way of knowing whether it will be you, or someone you pass it on to, who draws the short straw. Get vaccinated.”