Behavioral strategies to promote a national COVID-19 vaccine program
National efforts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine at “warp speed” are beginning to yield a safe and effective vaccine. But this important milestone is only the first step in an equally important challenge: getting a majority of the U.S. public vaccinated. A pharmacist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania draws up a COVID-19 vaccine dose. Diluted COVID-19 vaccines can only be kept at room-temperature for six hours before they expire. (Image: Dan Burke)
Authors of a viewpoint article in the
Journal of the American Medical Association share five strategies and implementation considerations, informed by insights from behavioral science, for a national COVID-19 vaccine promotion program.
Two commentaries published yesterday in
JAMA and a University of Michigan news release offer ideas from behavioral science and other fields to boost COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the United States and discuss the ethics of continuing placebo arms in trials of coronavirus vaccines already proven effective.
Evidence-based uptake strategies
The first commentary, by Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD, and Alison Buttenheim, PhD, MBA, of the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, and George Loewenstein, PhD, of Carnegie Mellon University, tackled the problem of Americans hesitancy to take a COVID-19 vaccine.
They noted a September survey of 10,093 US adults showing that only 51% were definitely or probably going to be vaccinated, 25% indicated a probable unwillingness to be vaccinated, and 24% said they were unlikely to take a vaccine. Black respondents, those with a high school education or less, and Republicans were particularly distrustful of the vaccines. New data published today by the Kai
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PHILADELPHIA (December 14, 2020) - National efforts to develop a coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine at warp speed will likely yield a safe and effective vaccine by early 2021. However, this important milestone is only the first step in an equally important challenge: getting a majority of the U.S. public vaccinated.
Authors of a viewpoint article in the
Journal of the American Medical Association share five strategies and implementation considerations, informed by insights from behavioral science, for a national COVID-19 vaccine promotion program. Alison M. Buttenheim, PhD, MBA, the Patricia Bleznak Silverstein and the Howard A. Silverstein Term Endowed Professorship in Global Women s Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing), is senior author of the article.