Vaccine advocacy drops the ball on simple marketing, 9 August 2025
If you want to encourage vaccination you don't show photos that evoke unsettled feelings. This is basic marketing.
Vaccine advocacy drops the ball on simple marketing.
Our vaccine strategy since the start of the pandemic has been this series of own goals, unforced errors, and failures. I've been complaining about this since the start of the pandemic that all the words and all the pictures around vaccinations are all wrong, always focused right in on the needles. Why? Because evoking bad emotions drives clicks maybe? But it's counter productive and therefore I believe any media doing this ought to be shamed as anti-vax. Especially if it's a medical outlet.
If you ever notice that the lasik ads on billboards, tv, or even the spoken ones on podcasts - they never ever mention the mechanics of EYE SURGERY. Obviously, they only mention the RESULTS. They're not saying they're gonna poke your eye! They tell you you can ditch your glasses.
So if you want to promote vaccination you don't show kids being held down and jabbed with a needle, you talk about how they're not getting measles, or covid, or whatever, you mention how bad the disease is, how good the protection is, and you don't show the damn needles. It's only helping the anti-vaxxers with their propaganda when the focus is on the needles instead of the results. Anti-vax proponents leverage the very common fear of needles. There may also be unnecessary fears of the injection or medications broadly, and even if irrational or unwarranted, those emotions are still real. And we know this is how they operate because they constantly refer to them as "injections" repeatedly, and referring to them as injections is a right-wing anti-vax buzzword.. An anti-vax activist who spoke in the public comments segment of the FDA VRBPAC meeting kept repeatedly calling them "injections"... And Walker Bragman reported that the Republican Senator Ron Johnson admitted why he uses the "injections" buzzword, basically because it sounds scary and bad.
So anyone wanting to promote vaccination should use common sense advertising and focus on all the benefits, and the real downsides of not getting vaccinated.
🗞️ In the news
CIDRAP - Disadvantaged COVID survivors at over twice the risk for long-term symptoms, researchers say Mary Van Beusekom, MS August 1, 2025 In total, 11% of participants developed long COVID. Financial hardship (adjusted marginal risk ratio [ARR], 2.36), food insecurity (ARR, 2.36), lack of a college degree (ARR, 1.60), experiences of medical discrimination (ARR, 2.37), foregone medical care due to cost (ARR, 2.87), lack of social support (ARR, 1.79), and living in ZIP codes with the most crowded households (ARR, 1.36) were linked to an increased risk of long COVID.
Another COVID Contrarian Working For the NIH Director. Kevin Bardosh, who argued COVID boosters do more harm than good for young people, has been working in Jay Bhattacharya’s office for months. Walker Bragman Aug 07, 2025 Bardosh was also affiliated with a pandemic group which formerly listed the NIH director on its team roster. Prior to joining the NIH in May 2023, the anthropologist was a director and head of research at a UK-based charity called Collateral Global. The group featured Bhattacharya on its scientific advisory and editorial boards. Collateral Global was co-founded in November 2020 by entrepreneur Alex Caccia, who had been involved in the drafting of the Great Barrington Declaration the previous month. The document, co-authored by Bhattacharya and two of his allies—biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, then of Harvard Medical School, and epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta of Oxford—outlined a COVID herd immunity strategy reliant on swift reopening and mass infection of the healthy population.
Vinay Prasad Returns to FDA Within two weeks of his unceremonious departure, the COVID vaccine skeptic is back as the nation’s top vaccine regulator. Walker Bragman Aug 09, 2025 The push to remove the CBER chief had begun with far-right activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer, who accused him of being a “leftist saboteur” working to undermine Trump’s deregulatory agenda. Loomer had resurfaced old tweets of Prasad’s in which the doctor, a well-known public health contrarian, had claimed to be a progressive despite his long advocacy for the laissez-faire response to the COVID-19 pandemic pushed by the political right. As Important Context has previously noted, these claims provided Prasad a certain amount of cover to evangelize right-wing positions, including casting doubt on the efficacy of COVID mitigation measures and the safety of the mRNA vaccines. Prasad has repeatedly hyped up concerns about rare, often self-resolving side effects of the shots, in young men in particular—namely myocarditis. He has demanded randomized controlled trials for boosters, cutting against the mainstream of public health and promising unnecessary delays in the face of a mutating virus.
Don’t buy into ageist or eugenics ideas that life should be over before you’re elderly.
This isn’t the first time some survey has hit the news that shows that people are happier when they’re over 50 compared to youth.
VOGUE – At What Age Do We Feel Happiest? The Answer May Surprise You By Jeanne Ballion March 14, 2025 After analyzing the results, the researchers found that there’s a certain age when people are happiest: 70. They also found that happiness across lifespan exists on a spectrum of valleys and peaks over time: Satisfaction with life declines between ages nine and 16, rises to reach its peak at age 70, then declines again until age 96 (the oldest age recorded in the study). “Overall, the study shows a positive trend over a large period of life, if we consider life satisfaction and negative emotional states,” says Bücker, who notes that by the age of 70, most people are less preoccupied with career and material matters, and have more time for themselves and their loved ones. Plus, these wiser septuagenarians feel that the most difficult and stressful experiences in life are behind them, while a sense of accomplishment helps lessen daily anxiety.
It’s also clear why older people have been found to be happier. It’s largely about being relieved from all sorts of arbitrary burdens. That’s why the so-called “happiness curve” just gets lost in noise globally. It will be lost in the US if the right-wing gets their way and cuts Social Security and Medicare when we should be expanding these things so that everyone has a chance to live free and happy.
My letter to reps:
Social Security must be expanded. I think the age of 67 for my age group is far too old, especially for those of us who’ve got physical problems from working physical jobs in our youth, and people who have lived for years without health insurance and the provided preventative care. Cutting Social Security is unacceptable. Seniors deserve to live with dignity.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Quote:
“All masters want to appear more brilliant than other people. They do not care about science or empirical truth or the latest invention. They care about their name and their glory.”
Robert Greene, 48 Laws of Power (2015)