5 takeaways:

➀ Google’s COVID-19 Vaccine Search Insights tool allows reporters to see the public’s main vaccine concerns — and how they differ by region. As people pop their questions into search bars, the tool sorts them into three broad categories: general interest in the vaccine, vaccination intent, and safety and side effects. That information — all aggregated and anonymized, so people’s individual queries aren’t revealed — is available to the state, county and, eventually, ZIP code level. It shows changes over time, with weekly totals. Reporters can see how demand for information moved across the country as vaccines became available, and how concerns about safety emerged in some communities. Clicking through the weekly maps reveals how questions about where to get the vaccine became dominant in some states that were trying vaccine lotteries. Consider Ohio, which announced Vax-a-Million, an incentive program to get people vaccinated, in May. “All of the sudden there was this huge spike,” said Google’s Tomer Shekel, who developed the tool. In July, the Google tool showed how concerns about safety arose in southwest Missouri, a low-vaccination area that had begun to see a rise in COVID cases.

➁ A separate tool can point reporters to vaccine deserts around the U.S. The Vaccine Equity Planner was developed by Harvard-affiliated Ariadne Labs and Boston Children’s Hospital to show where it’s relatively harder to find the vaccine and the travel times to get there. “Geographic access still matters,” said Dr. Rebecca Weintraub of Harvard Medical School, who worked with Google to build the tool. In all, 17 million people live in rural vaccine deserts and 50 million people live in urban ones. At the same time, there are 800 primary health care centers, 1,000 Federally Qualified Health Centers, 1,200 pharmacies, 1,600 retail stores and 14,000 places of worship in those deserts that could administer vaccines. Users of the planner can define a desert as being either 15 or 30 minutes away from a vaccines site by car, on foot or on public transportation.

➂ Reporters can examine the “social vulnerability index” in connection with vaccine uptake. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention created that measure to illustrate the negative effects of external stressors on community health. Stressors include natural or human-caused disasters, or disease outbreaks. The index uses 15 U.S. Census Bureau variables to help local officials identify underserved communities. The Vaccine Equity Planner displays counties by their social vulnerability index, the number of people who intend to be vaccinated but aren’t yet, and whether the county is in a vaccine desert.

➃ The easy part of the vaccination effort is over. Reporters must prepare to cover the hard work that remains. A few states have blown past the White House goal of having 70% of adults vaccinated. But many states are well behind, and overall the nation fell just short. The football-stadium mass vaccination sites of March and April are fading in importance. “We’re at the point we have to do this ground game,” said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “… You’ve got to go to communities, bang on doors. … When you want to get to people who are underserved and people who have a great deal of concerns, you absolutely have to do this old-fashioned public health.” But many people who are unvaccinated are not vaccine hesitant — they just haven’t gotten around to getting the shots, Benjamin said.

➄ The media play a big role in combatting misinformation. Benjamin pointed to the COVID Collaborative effort from the Ad Council as a good source. He said perhaps 12% to 14% of the population is and will remain highly skeptical of the vaccine. “It is highly unlikely they’re going to get vaccinated,” he said. But others are movable. “I think people want the right information,” he added. “And I think that even people who are living in the ecosystem where they’re getting a lot of bad information, in general they know they’re getting bad information. … So to the extent that we can give people the right information and raise their concern without scaring them to death, I think is the goal of public health.”

Speakers: 

Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, Executive Director, American Public Health Association

Dr. Rebecca Weintraub, Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Director, Better Evidence, Ariadne Labs

Tomer Shekel, Senior Product Manager, Google Health

This program is funded by donations to the National Press Foundation, which is solely responsible for its content.