INTRODUCTION
COVID vaccine hesitancy, coronavirus disease 2019
FOX, CORONAVIRUS DISEASE 2019
This paper reports results from a large-scale randomized controlled trial assessing whether counter-stereotypical messaging and partisan cues can induce people to get COVID-19 vaccines. The study used a 27-s video compilation of Donald Trump’s comments about the vaccine from Fox News interviews and presented the video to millions of U.S. YouTube users through a $100,000 advertising campaign in October 2021. Results indicate that the number of vaccines increased in the average treated county by 103 (with a one-tailed A nationwide field experiment shows how to reduce COVID vaccine hesitancy using political messengers.In June 2021, U.S. White House chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci warned that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination disparities could lead to the emergence of “two Americas,” where regions with higher vaccination rates would fare much better than those with lower rates (Geographic divides in vaccination rates were driven by several factors, including differences in race, ethnicity, income, urbanicity, education, and age, which were all associated with Americans’ decisions to get vaccinated. However, political partisanship was the deepest fault line and seen by many as the key to understanding vaccination divides (We posited that a remedy for this partisan divide might come from the same mechanism that created the disparity in the first place: partisan cues. Research shows that partisans form preferences by following cues from their party leaders (To test this hypothesis, we created a public service announcement (PSA), featuring news clips of Donald Trump on Fox News encouraging his supporters to get vaccinated. The PSA can be viewed at 