Thread by @RanuDhillon

We're deploying vaccines like we do annual flu shots rather than the mass vaccinations done in Africa & Asia where millions are vaccinated in weeks

Years ago, Joe Rhatigan & I studied these campaigns. They offer several lessons that can inform what we need in the US now

THREAD

1/ Be proactive

Instead of passively waiting for people to come get vaccinated, we need to search them out & go to where they are & keep following up until they opt out or are vaccinated

We should be rolling out the vaccine like we do the Census, even going door-to-door

2/ Remove barriers & be redundant

In each community, have multiple ways to get vaccinated including CVS/Walgreens, pop-up sites & near high-throughput places people have to to go like grocery stores

Make some venues 24/7 so people can get vaccinated anytime that works for them

3/ Microplanning

In mass vaccination campaigns, each locality developed detailed community-by-community plans for getting each eligible person vaccinated

We need similarly granular plans for how each & every person will be reached & ways to monitor location-specific coverage

4/ Community engagement

As we're already seeing, getting buy-in is not as simple as mass media messaging

We need systematic community-by-community efforts to inform, engage, address concerns & cultivate trust. This can't be haphazard & needs to be done with rigor & resources

5/ Leverage skills

We're in an emergency & we need all hands on deck

Millions have skills that can help expand vaccination. Volunteers can organize lists, conduct community engagement or even be trained to administer vaccines under the supervision of nurses

6/ Logistics, logistics, logistics

Mass vaccination campaigns invested in transport, storage etc to get things done without hiccups & lapses

We need federal funding & partnerships with relevant companies to make the distribution, tracking, storage etc of vaccines seamless

If mass vaccination campaigns were able to vaccinate thousands of people within weeks including in some of the poorest & toughest places in the world (including warzones), we can do much better than we are now in the US

This is an emergency; every delay means more cases & lives

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