The White House’s “We Can Do This” COVID-19 public education campaign, launched in 2021 to boost vaccine confidence, has been credited with saving over 50,000 lives, as revealed in a study published on Monday.
Researchers at Fors Marsh discovered that the program also saved hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and millions of COVID-19 cases, saving the country hundreds of billions of dollars in less than a year.
Related posts
The study’s authors, who published their findings in the Journal of Health Communications, concluded that public education campaigns are a cost-effective strategy to lower COVID-19 morbidity and mortality.
The Biden administration officially launched the We Can Do This campaign in April 2021, and the researchers said they closely examined it. The Department of Health and Human Services employed “integrated, multichannel, research-based strategies” to encourage the adoption of the COVID-19 vaccine, hailed at the time as one of the most significant public health education initiatives in US history.
The goal was to contact 90% of US adults at least once a quarter, with a special emphasis on high-risk groups. Officials distributed 7,000 advertisements in 14 languages, including geographically and ethnically customized multimedia messages delivered by “trusted messengers” to persuade “vaccine-hesitant populations” to roll up their sleeves.
The researchers evaluated the campaign’s success using data from the first three waves of the COVID-19 Attitudes and Beliefs Survey, or CABS. Beginning in January 2021, U.S. adults participate in the “nationally representative, probability-sampled longitudinal survey” known as CABS every four months.
The web-based questionnaires questioned participants about COVID-19 immunization, their views and beliefs regarding COVID and preventative actions, and what they remembered about their exposure to the We Can Do This campaign.
There were 4,398 responses to the Wave 1 survey (conducted January–February 2021), 3,962 to the Wave 2 survey (May–June 2021), and 3,642 to the Wave 3 survey (September–November 2021).
According to the report, from April 2021 to March 2022, the campaign’s net benefit, defined as how much money these initiatives saved minus how much they cost, was $731.9 billion, representing an $89.54 return on investment for every $1 spent.
HHS officials praised the results on Monday, stating that the campaign encouraged 22.3 million people to complete their primary COVID-19 vaccination series between April 2021 and March 2022, preventing nearly 2.6 million SARS-CoV-2 infections and 244,000 hospitalizations during a time when the highly contagious Delta and Omicron virus variants were rapidly spreading.
“HHS is responsible for ensuring the health and well-being of all Americans. As stewards of the public’s money, we wanted to make an impact for the American people in the most efficient and effective manner possible,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra’s aide in a statement.
“This confirms that we did exactly that.” “We will undoubtedly use what we learned from this campaign to improve our public health efforts in the future,” he added.
