Our Rutgers-affiliated NGO, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), set out to create a data-driven forecast of vaccine reluctance. In collaboration with tech leaders from Google and Walmart, the NCRI developed a large-scale climate model of vaccine reluctance. And what we found was that vaccine reluctance was correlated with a number of factors, including ethnic composition, searches on Google about side effects, wealth and inequality, partisanship in voter outcomes, percentages of health-challenged individuals, and tweets about COVID-related conspiracies.
But the most interesting thing we found was not who didn’t want the vaccine, but who was succeeding in changing their minds. Walmart, the megastore, was managing to reach hesitant communities, even red ones, and get their members vaccinated.
And our analysis of their data seems to indicate that they have been especially successful with the three most vaccine-averse groups: Trump voters, evangelicals and African Americans.
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Related on the SLP
It was not by accident. Walmart has been programmatically reaching into hesitant communities with an approach based on “meeting people where they are,” working with the leaders and members of these communities, both where they live and as they are found.
