Trump vaccine message led to 104,000 more shots

A YouTube ad featuring former President Donald Trump convinced about 104,000 people to get vaccinated for COVID-19, according to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic research on Monday.

The authors wanted to see if vaccine skeptics could be persuaded to get vaccinated by someone they were politically aligned with. Data shows that vaccination has been politically divisive – of the 27% of American adults who remained unvaccinated, 60% identify as Republicans compared to 17% as Democrats.

“While a majority of both parties are vaccinated, those who remain unvaccinated are largely Republicans, despite messaging from the CDC and medical experts about the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine,” said author Brad Larsen, an assistant professor of economics at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences and a faculty fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

“We felt like there should be a better way to send a message that would resonate with people on the right.”

The researchers created a 27-second YouTube ad that included a Fox News interview with Trump where he urged his supported to get vaccinated and a local Utah news broadcaster sharing Trump and First Lady Melania Trump’s vaccination status.

They then used Google Ads to target counties with low vaccination rates in Oct. 2021. 1,083 counties were randomly chosen to show the ads, while a control group of 1,085 similar counties were not shown the ad. The campaign resulted in 11.6 million impressions with 6 million unique viewers.

Analyzing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers found that vaccinations rose an average of 103 in the counties that received the ad compared to those who did not, totaling 104,036 across all counties.

The study also found this increase was cheap when delivered by someone they agreed with politically. It cost about on average $1 or less in advertising to lead one more person to take the vaccine, as about $99,000 was spent on advertising.

“As many have observed, a tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic is the extent to which protective measures became tangled in Americans’ political identities, which led to deaths and suffering that could have been avoided,” Larsen and his co-authors wrote in the paper.

“If politics characterizes one aspect of the problem, it might also point to part of a solution.”