Going viral on vaccines

A sustained publicity campaign is urgently needed

Widespread vaccine hesitancy and the absence of Covid-appropriate behaviour, especially in rural and moffusil India, are becoming critical problems in controlling the wildfire spread of the second wave of the pandemic. In these districts, local health workers are reporting flat refusals by citizens to be vaccinated on fears that the vaccine would cause serious side effects. This is partly the result of the distrust created by the government’s initial lack of transparency on the vaccines. On the other hand, sheer ignorance about the criticality of masking and social distancing is making rural India a superspreader by default. Given that these issues were well known before the vaccination drive began in January, a sustained campaign to address the criticality and safety of vaccines would have been in order. Although the government did put out some posters to this effect and some messages appeared on TV channels, the effort appeared to be in the nature of a token gesture rather than a serious campaign.

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan spoke of how smallpox and polio were eliminated in India through a mass immunisation programme. The reference was apt because both those programmes involved energetic and widespread education campaigns that were driven from the prime minister’s office in conjunction with the World Health Organization and some of the country’s largest corporations, and involved hundreds of thousands of health workers. Surviving posters from the smallpox and polio programmes confirm the imaginative use of imagery and messaging — from the invocation of Shitala Mata as the “pox goddess” to evocative posters that resembled tobacco warnings on cigarette packets, warning of the dangers of going unvaccinated.

The irony is that India is endowed with far richer media and corporate resources to spread the messages more convincingly than it had in the 1970s. In those days, the effort relied on a government-owned radio channel, messages scrawled on walls, and saturation coverage of posters backed by armies of trained workers to administer vaccines. People were offered a reward of Rs 100 if they reported smallpox cases to the local health centre, which proved an effective track-and-trace system. Today, the reach of Doordarshan and social media is far larger and access to the remotest parts of India way better than it was four decades ago. With a wealth of advertising talent at India’s disposal, it would be relatively easy to conceive of nationwide local language campaigns endorsed by celebrities such as Virat Kohli, Amitabh Bachchan, Rajinikanth, P V Sindhu, or Alia Bhatt. If mobile ringtones can be fashioned for political messages at election time, they can be used to exhort people to mask up, a practice some state administrations did follow in the early days, and take the jab too.

Now, as then, these efforts could be bolstered by working with panchayat and local health auxiliaries as well as public and private sector corporations with large operations in the hinterlands. Including the spend on such education programmes under the CSR mandate rather than restricting them to creating pandemic infrastructure would help. The government might discover greater benefits if it were to apply itself to this urgent messaging effort rather than launching a TV channel to convey its views abroad. India’s international image would, after all, benefit infinitely more from a sound vaccination campaign than talking heads on TV.