DISCUSSION
death
FOX, FLU
The COVID-19 vaccines proved effective, substantially reducing the chances of hospitalization and death among those who took them. Remarkably, politics became a major obstacle to their adoption and use. Large segments of the population declined to be vaccinated, with partisanship exerting the largest effect. Hesitancy in the U.S. proved especially high, with rates of vaccination barely among the top 50 countries in February 2022 (But if politics characterizes one aspect of the problem, it might also be part of a solution. We find that positioning Donald Trump and Fox News as counter-stereotypical messenger is likely a cost-effective way to overcome hesitancy among people who still had not been vaccinated, months after the vaccines became widely available. An important caveat to our results is that we do not have conclusive evidence that it was indeed the counter-stereotypical nature of the message that led to its effectiveness; we may have simply designed an effective ad, and it is possible that other (nonpolitical) ads would have a similar positive impact. Unfortunately, there is scant experimental evidence of the effectiveness of advertising on COVID-19 vaccine uptake to which our effects can be compared. Regardless of the specific mechanism, our point estimates suggest higher number of vaccines per dollar spent than other interventions that have been studied.Are our findings scalable? We believe they are. With seasonal flu vaccines—and immunization attitudes generally—starting to show signs of increased partisan schism in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Whether the dividing line is politics or something else, our study suggests that public health proponents might do well to reflect on messengers whose voices might carry special weight among target populations. For example, other research finds that a pro-masking message from a military general increases support for masking among political conservatives (