How to reach vaccine skeptics: A booster shot of ideas

Public-health messages that I think could make a positive difference might run along these lines:

(1) You’re right, we can’t know the long-term effects of these vaccines, because you can’t study over the long term when you’re in the midst of a pandemic. But given what we know about medicine historically, there’s a plausible explanation for why the risks of unknown long-term side effects are infinitesimally low. There is a leap of faith involved, but everything we know tells us that the mRNA vaccine is an exciting medical development.

(2) Yes, you’re likely to survive COVID, but its long-term effects in some people are real. We know this from testimonies of people who believed themselves to be healthy before getting infected but who nonetheless are suffering from long-term loss of smell and other symptoms.

(3) The government should develop a website that contextualizes, as much as possible, the information available on its own Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) site. Vaccine skeptics have mined the information on the VAERS site for talking points. They combine it with anecdotal reports and video evidence of some pretty frightening-looking medical events. Without better interpretation of this data from vaccine advocates, the fearful will believe the skeptics who are talking about it with them.