“I just want to say to all of you cowards out there: Don’t be such a chicken squat,” Parton (inset), 75, said in a video after receiving her vaccine in Tennessee. “Get out there and get your shot.” This is hardly the first time public figures have thrown their popularity behind an effort to change the behavior of ordinary people. In medicine, celebrity endorsements tend to echo or reinforce messages that health authorities are trying to publicise, whether it’s getting a vaccine, or other medical treatment. In 18th-century Russia, Catherine the Great was inoculated against smallpox as part of her campaign to promote the nationwide rollout of the procedure. Almost 200 years later, backstage at “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Elvis Presley received the polio vaccine in an effort to help reach at-risk teenagers.
But do the
star-studded endorsements really work? Not necessarily. Epidemiologists say
there are plenty of caveats and potential pitfalls — and little scientific
evidence to prove that the endorsements actually boost vaccine uptake. “Very
few people actually do give the weight of expertise, for better or worse, to
celebrities,” said René F. Najera, an epidemiologist and the editor of the
History of Vaccines website, a project of the College of Physicians of
Philadelphia. “There’s some shift there now with social media and social influence
in the younger age groups,” he added. “But for the most part, we still listen
more to our peers than to some figurehead.”
As vaccination
campaigns accelerate around the world, watching high-profile endorsements has
become one of the latest — and among the weirdest — online rituals of the COVID
era. To help track the phenomenon, New York Magazine over the winter kept a
running list of newly vaccinated celebrities that includes Christie Brinkley
(“piece of cake”), Whoopi Goldberg (“I didn’t feel it”) and Mandy Patinkin
(“One of the few benefits of being old”). Journalists in India have done the
same for Bollywood film stars.
In Europe, pictures of
male politicians getting their shots while shirtless have generated a bunch of
memes. An epidemiologist in Oregon, Dr. Esther Choo, joked on Twitter that the
French health minister, Olivier Véran, was carrying out a public-relations
campaign that she called “Operation Smolder.”
Such posts are notable
because they instantly allow millions of people to see the raw mechanics of
immunisation — needles and all — at a time when skepticism toward COVID
vaccines has been stubbornly persistent in the United States and beyond. The
rapid-fire testimonials by Pelé, Parton and the Dalai Lama in March, for
example, collectively reached more than 30 million followers and prompted
hundreds of thousands of engagements across Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. In
April, the singer Ciara hosted a star-studded NBC special meant to promote
vaccinations, with appearances by former President Barack Obama and his wife,
Michelle Obama, as well as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jennifer Hudson, Matthew
McConaughey and others.
“These kind of
endorsements might be especially important if trust in government/official
sources is quite low,” Tracy Epton, a psychologist at the University of
Manchester in Britain who has studied public health interventions during the
coronavirus pandemic, said in an email. That was the case in the 1950s, when
Elvis Presley agreed to receive the polio vaccine to help the National
Foundation for Infantile Paralysis reach a demographic — teenagers — that was
“difficult to educate and inspire through traditional means,” said Stephen E.
Mawdsley, a lecturer in modern American history at the University of Bristol in
Britain. “I think Elvis helped to make getting vaccinated seem ‘cool’ and not
just the responsible thing to do,” Dr. Mawdsley said.
Comments
Post a Comment