COVID-19 Vaccines and Diffusion
In the article titled “How To Convince People To Take The Covid Vaccine? A Lesson In Leadership Communication,” Thomas Roulet conveys the challenge that lies ahead of marketing the Covid’19 vaccine. Roulet opens the article by mentioning countries like the “UK have already started the Covid vaccination campaign” and that “others, such as France and or the United States” are also rushing to approve the vaccines. Roulet states that these countries “need to tackle the somehow misleading assumption that people will want to be vaccinated.” Roulet understands that the general public are having doubts about the vaccine and not everybody is on board for taking it. The author of this article argues that “the acceptance rate for the vaccine is low, and many remain to be convinced.” In some countries like Russia it was reported in a study published by Nature in October 2020 that “only 55% report accepting a potential Covid vaccine.” In other polls it was also reported that “59% of the French … 63% pf Brits or 55% of Italians were on board” for taking the vaccine. In the UK it was also discovered that only “28% of 18- to 34-year-old reported they would take” it. These results are surprising when comparing them to other countries such as China that have “90%” of the population ready to be vaccinated. Roulet explores the reasons behind this drastic difference.
In the article it is suggested that the “power of the crowd” could account for the difference in accepting probability from country to country. Roulet believes that “beyond convincing the population that the vaccine is safe and crucial for both individuals and the collectivity, there is a second mechanism” that could be utilized to promote the vaccine. The author states that “in a situation of ambiguity, we tend to look at what others do make our own decisions.” To defend this argument Roulet mentions a 2015 study that explained how “we tend to align on what we perceive as the majority opinion, to avoid feeling isolated.” Roulet suggests this will aid in the promotion of the vaccine. In other words “if we feel like everybody else is taking the vaccine, we are likely to do so too.” Roulet then continues to list examples of countries that are using this phenomenon to their advantage. He describes how England is “enlisting ‘sensible’ celebrities” and how Scotland is administering the first vaccine on TV in effort to promote trust in the vaccine. This is all in hopes that the “power of the crowd” increases the number of people that take the vaccine.
The “power of the crowd” idea explained in this article relates to the concept of diffusion in networks. Diffusion is the process of new behaviors, practices, opinions, technologies and more spread from person to person in a social network. This occurs as people influence their friends or family to adopt this new thing. Diffusion can directly be linked to the spread of the vaccine and the “power of the crowd” concept. If a person gets the Covid vaccination, they are going to convince all of their friends to do the same to limit risk of infection. Similarly, from the other perspective, if the majority of my friends are vaccinated, I would feel obligated to get vaccinated to not be the weak link. With diffusion there is a possibility of a complete cascade unless there are clusters. This can explain why in some countries like China a large percent of the population is willing to accept the vaccine and in other countries that percentage is significantly lower. If we consider each country in the world as a cluster then it is evident that if the vaccine is popular in one country (90% in China) that does not mean the same case for others (55% in Russia). This is due to the fact that a person living in Russia is more likely to have more friends in Russia than China so they won’t me influenced to take the vaccine. In order to make the vaccine popular in both countries I would need one influencer in China and one in Russia. The reason there is not a full cascade in a country even with an initial influencer is because cities within countries could also be perceived as clusters making it difficult for a complete nationwide cascade.
The United States (US) understands the role of diffusion in increasing the popularity of this Covid vaccine and therefore is taking action to promote trust. Similar to how the article mentions using celebrities and TV to market the vaccine the US is doing the same. As soon as word came out about the US approving a vaccine, distrust was built in many Americans hearts. In order to fix this, it was announced on CNN that former presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton would take the vaccine publicly to prove its safety. Because these influencers are part of many different political and social clusters, having them take the vaccine publicly will significantly increase the popularity of the vaccine. In order to further legitimize the vaccine more initial influencers need to be introduced to reach as many clusters (states, cities, political parties, etc.) as possible and increase the possibility of causing a nationwide cascade.