In a creative effort to boost COVID-19 vaccination rates, a recent study has found that some people can be persuaded get the shot if former President Donald Trump tells them to.
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Around a year ago, a team of economists and political scientists came together to create a unique solution to vaccine hesitancy.
"We recognized that we were starting to see a situation where Republicans were less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats," Steven Greene, professor of political science at North Carolina State University, told KCBS Radio.
The group knew that Trump had spoken favorably about the COVID-19 vaccine on a few occasions, but the comments were not widely covered in popular media. "We thought if we could just get this information out to Donald Trump supporters who might be otherwise vaccine skeptical, that this could help make a difference," Greene explained.
Conducting a large-scale advertising experiment, Greene and his team created an ad based on Fox News coverage with Trump and Maria Bartiromo where the former president supports the vaccination. They uploaded it to YouTube and channeled it into counties where vaccination rates were low. In the clip, Trump states, "I got the vaccine, you should too."
"We found that it works," Greene said.
The ad was implemented in roughly 1,000 counties. When comparing those counties to other low vaccination rate counties, the study concluded that 100 more people got vaccinated from each county on average.
To encourage more Americans to get vaccinated in the future, Greene proposed maybe the solution is not through science, but instead by embracing politics. "Politics is part of the problem… Politics can be part of the solution," he said. "The reality is, people look to important figures for cues in their life and for a lot of people those figures can be political figures."
Even though the message is pro-vaccination, Greene admitted many outlets have been hesitant to run the Trump ad as he is a "political hot potato."
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