A new nonprofit, the COVID Collaborative, was launched today with the release of a national survey by Langer Research Associates deeply evaluating vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans.
 
Grounded in a review of the literature and consultation with experts in the vaccine uptake and health equity fields, the study delves into predictors of intention to get vaccinated against the coronavirus as well as predictors of trust in vaccine safety and in the vaccine development process.
 
It finds broad distrust in the safety of the vaccine and describes avenues to encouraging uptake, including enhanced understanding of the development and approval process, the power of moral and subjective norms and messaging that’s sensitive to Black people’s experience of discrimination and mistreatment in current and historical medical practices.
 
Conducted among a random national sample of 1,050 Black adults, with a sample of 258 Latinx adults for comparison, the study is being used to help inform a $50 million vaccine education campaign directed by the Ad Council with the participation of the NAACP and UnidosUS.

See coverage of the survey in the Washington Post. 

The COVID Collaborative is a nonpartisan nonprofit created to work with state and local leaders to forge solutions to the pandemic. It was co-founded by John Bridgeland of the social enterprise firm Civic and Michelle Williams, dean of faculty at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. Former Govs. Dirk Kempthorne, R-Idaho, and Deval Patrick, D-Massachusetts, serve as co-chairs of its Advisory Council, joined by a range of political and public health leaders.

See our report here. Full materials, including the survey questionnaire, crosstabulated data tables and dataset in .sav and .csv formats, are available on the Societal Experts Action Networks COVID-19 Survey Archive; in Search, enter “COVID Collaborative” in the Project field.