Selling Vaccination — Romantically
Let's tell the vaccine-hesitant they’re not boyfriend material
“Of course I’d like to go on a date,” the attractive lady says into her phone. “You’re a great guy.”
She pauses. “You’ve been vaccinated, right?”
She waits for the answer. “Well, call me back when you get your ‘Fauci ouchie,’ okay?”
The word PFIZER appears on the screen in big block letters, surrounded by little pink hearts. “Get yours now!”
We need commercials like that. They’re better than trying to shame and bully vaccine refusers into helping us achieve herd immunity.
Those who haven’t competed in the delightful national sport of trying to land a vax appointment are either wary of medicine or feel put-upon by elitist scientists and politicians. Some still think COVID-19 is just a bad flu.
So let’s stop telling people they might die and start telling them they might die alone.
We’ve been down this road many times before. Madison Avenue kept millions of women guessing for years whether they could hold onto a man without using specific personal hygiene products. And fear of being rejected by the opposite sex due to employing the wrong deodorants has been very effective across the board, too.
American business has been good at this for a long time. Listerine dredged up an obscure medical term in the 1920s, halitosis, to help terrify people about bad breath ruining their social lives. Before that, people didn’t even know breath needed to smell nice.
We don’t have to convince people that vaccines are good or even that COVID-19 is bad. All the ads have to do is plant the seed that if you don’t get vaccinated, you may never get laid again.
Such advertising should not be a government mission. The more the government gets involved, the more likely a significant segment of the “vaccine-hesitant” -- Republican men -- will dig in their heels.
They would rather die than give in to “the nanny state.”
Black and brown people often aren’t too willing to go to the mat on the advice of the government, either. Politicians backing the medical establishment in denying you equal care, and in experimenting on you without permission, are not confidence builders.
So it would be reasonable for pro-vaccine campaigns to be generated not by the feds but through the blitzkrieg-like efficiency of Big Pharma’s marketing Wehrmacht itself. After all, Americans have had little problem believing corporate sales pitches in the past.
Decades after cigarettes were known to cause cancer, millions were still buying cigarettes because they were convinced smoking made them look cool and sexy.
It did make them look cool and sexy. It killed millions of them, but along the way, they were bitchin’.
Alternatively, pro-vaccine campaigns could be aired by non-profits. The Lincoln Project can make a convincing argument that without it, Donald Trump would still be tweeting from the Oval Office.
Romantically oriented vaccine campaigns would probably work on married people as well as singles. According to polls, at least half of those who are coupled-up cheat on their spouses. So the threat of infection could be used to make them doubtful they will be able to convince anybody to sneak around with them.
“My husband doesn’t satisfy my needs in the bedroom,” an actress complains suggestively for the camera. “I’m willing to give you a shot.”
Her prospective lover gives her a long, languorous look.
“But first, darling,” he says, “Have you had your Johnson & Johnson shot?”
As long as we’re aiming at the cheaters, we should also target the people whose entire lives revolve around thoughts of sex. We know that the geographic centers of vaccine avoidance are largely congruent with the centers of pornography fandom.
Embedding the vaccine message in porn film storylines should be a cinch.
For instance, after getting a vaccine, we have to wait 15 minutes as the staff watches for side-effects. It staggers the imagination to consider what a porn film director could do with a steady stream of men and women arriving in a big room to waste time with strangers.
Americans are good at marketing. Advertisements are among the few things left that we’re adept at. That, and making vaccines, apparently.
So let’s work from our strength. We won’t get anywhere trying to make vaccine decliners feel bad about themselves.
Our best hope is to try to convince them that the rest of us just don’t feel quite good enough about them to take our masks off.
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