Biden’s Spaghetti-at-the-Wall Vaccine Campaign
What will it take? Eighty-year-old Anthony Fauci is on TikTok trying to reach the young and unvaccinated. Dating apps are steering people toward health clinics. The first lady, Jill Biden, is venturing into red America to coax the unwilling into getting shots. White House aides regularly swap messages on an email chain dubbed “Ideas” that flags inventive ways of persuading people to do their part to end the pandemic. On Wednesday, the pop star Olivia Rodrigo made a cameo at the White House press briefing to urge her young fans to get vaccinated. “We’re focusing on an all-of-the-above strategy,” Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, told me recently. Or maybe it’s a spaghetti-at-the-wall strategy.
You might think that, in his quest to quell the coronavirus, President Joe Biden would be ready to try . But there are indeed some things he won’t try, and the reason is a familiar one. Biden’s vaccination drive has the feel of a political campaign that’s targeting the persuadable middle, when what’s really needed is a novel way to reach the proudly irrational. He’s using many of the same tools he employed in 2020: celebrity endorsements and door-to-door contacts, TV ads and the bully pulpit. Fewer and fewer unvaccinated Americans are heeding the message. Compared, only about half a million people are now getting vaccinated on a given day. Nearly one-third of the adult population hasn’t gotten a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine at a time when the far more infectious is sweeping the nation. There’s no assurance that more of the same will produce a better result.
