Now that there’s a coronavirus vaccine, how do you persuade people to take it?

Memo to docs? More empathy. Less authority.

These messaging strategies are aimed at winning over vaccine fence-sitters in much the way political campaigns target would-be voters. But in the life-or-death battle against the coronavirus, as many as 70 percent of Americans must roll up their sleeves in the coming months to achieve herd immunity and stop the virus’s spread.

And, unlike in well-oiled ­political machines, public health officials say they are having to quickly rethink communications strategies that have long been hampered by a lack of funding. At this politically charged moment, they also face the formidable task of introducing a new product to people who distrust science and are receiving competing narratives from anti-vaccination campaigns, which were seeding doubt about coronavirus shots before they were even developed.

The old approach to public health communications was to come to a least common denominator and repeat, repeat, repeat,” said Christopher Graves, founder of the Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science at Ogilvy Consulting, who has been leading workshops on the behavioral science of health communications with a focus on vaccine hesitancy for the World Health Organization and UNICEF in addition to a major vaccine maker.

“When it comes to vaccine hesitancy, it is more like personalized medicine,” he said, “more customized to specific worldviews and cultural filters.” ...

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