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FEATURED POST

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Hello!
 
My name is Shreya Jeyakumar and I am currently a sophomore at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign majoring in Molecular and Cellular Biology. In the last couple of months, I have had such a unique opportunity to really research and understand the effects of COVID-19 on both a community and global scale through the LAS 199 COVID-Corps class.
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Crowd with Masks

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This semester, myself and an amazing team of three other students had the incredible opportunity to work with UNITY in Action magazine to spread awareness about a prevalent health issue in our community.  We worked together via Zoom every week to develop a project that would ideally work to unite the members of our community against COVID-19. We had a tough job; we aimed to create a structured splay of information that broke down common misconceptions of the COVID-19 vaccine and in turn, would motivate different community groups to go out and get vaccinated. Our finished project was a colorful infographic with common FAQs and myths about the COVID-19 vaccine, each with an answer and explanation from trusted and reliable sources, like the WHO and the CDC.

We had two main problems to combat in creating our infographic; in times of crises like the current pandemic, it is very easy for the general public to get swept up in the flood of information being released about the virus itself and the vaccine. For the non-scientifically trained mind, it is quite easy to fall prey to various false sources that offer incorrect claims with a more pseudoscience-based backing. As I mentioned in a previous Op-Ed that I wrote, “every hour experts are continually learning something new about the virus”, and I still believe that the public should be kept updated with this information via updates from trusted sources. My team and I had to work together to find a way to dismantle these commonly believed myths about the vaccine in a way that was informative and understanding. This was no easy job; we had to comprehend that every single person has a different background, beliefs, childhood experiences, etc., that affect their decisions regarding receiving the vaccine and we had to take into account when forming our project. How could we work to find a way to target all of these different determinants? We decided that we had to put use our connections, we had to utilize different pillars of the community to spread our message. We discussed with the CUPHD, pastors, members of educational boards in the aim of spreading our misconception infographic around in a way that as much of the community as possible had access to correct information, regardless of these distinct determinants.

Another question we had to consider was who exactly needed to hear this information the most? Who could benefit the most from reading the debunking of common misconceptions of the vaccine and how important it was to receive it? Previously, in writing my Op-Ed regarding fake news and public health messaging, I read through and cited an incredible piece titled “Race and The Roots of Vaccine Skepticism”, from All Things Considered, where I learned that only 43% of African Americans states that they would receive the COVID-19 vaccine if it was available to them. This was the lowest rate of all the racial groups surveyed. Through more surveying of this podcast, I concluded that this is an issue that is continually being aggravated through the pandemic, and one of the main ways to combat this is to relieve vaccine distrust by dissipating any gaps in information and resources. Another main point that my team and I stressed with our public messaging project was that we needed to get out this infographic to minority groups in particular, by using trusted presences and easily understandable and accurate information. We discussed with local pastors and small organization leaders of color just how important it was to promote our information, and hopefully, this would encourage many members of our black community to look more into vaccination information since the suggestion itself would be coming from trusted and well-known faces. We had to be able to overcome some of the vaccine skepticism that I mentioned before, which I concluded to stem from years of medical distrust for minority groups.

So indeed, we aimed to get our information out mainly to minority groups and under-informed parts of the community in order to increase the number of vaccinations in those particular populations. But our infographic is deemed to apply to everyone who has any concerns or questions about the vaccine. We aimed to use colorful pictograms in our infographic that would capture the eye and be visually pleasing. In addition, we tried to keep our FAQs and myth debunking to a very simple wording, with no excessive scientific jargon that could be hard to follow or understand for the general public.

As I was writing my final Global Reset Op-Ed for this class, CUPHD’s Julie Pryde’s general message to our community stuck with me: “Keep doing the hard stuff that we have been doing, let’s not overwhelm our healthcare system”. It really shed light on the idea that in order for us to create a healthy, united society, we have to work together to help others. I think this really ties into the field of community health and public health messaging, to keep the public up-to-date and informed with the many new updates of this pandemic and to encourage people to get vaccinated in order to re-establish a healthy state of living for themselves and others. Only by providing accurate information to ALL members of the community, can we ensure a well-informed society that really values and upkeeps the state of public health. In my very first Op-Ed for this course, I mentioned that one of the contributors to the “breakdown of fragile institutions of governance and community norms” are directly correlated to uneven or uninformed public health responses. I really believe that this goes to show just how important public health messaging really is, it provides the largest and most basal framework for all aspects of community health.

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The completed infographic my team created had around 8 different FAQs and myths that we worked to debunk. The featured post I have on the home page of this blog is only 2 of those FAQs! 

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Analysis:

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Probably the most important argument that our infographic expresses is that everyone should get vaccinated if given the opportunity. Vaccination is one of the biggest steps in progressing towards herd immunity and potential re-establishment to healthy living in our community. It does not only benefit an individual, but everyone around them. We are aiming to buffer this argument by trying to dissipate any misconceptions surrounding the vaccine that may prevent someone from receiving it. By answering any frequently asked questions about the vaccine and debunking myths about it by using certified information, we can provide the most accurate detailing that will hopefully encourage the public to vaccinate. The FAQs that we chose to answer in our infographic resemble FAQs on the WHO and CDA COVID-19 web pages, so we decided to proceed with this information based off of the assumption that a good population of the public actually wants answers to these questions or believes these false myths. I believe that quite a lot of people are already aware of the general pathogenesis of COVID-19, based off the continual reporting on news broadcasts. They probably also are aware about the seriousness of the pandemic, just by seeing the towering amounts of infection cases and death rates that are also being constantly reported on by news sites. It is important that the public is aware of this because it depicts just how dangerous this virus can be and the effect it is having to our nation and around the globe. It is a very real and serious issue and it is something that we can fight against, but only if we unite in terms of preventing and treatment. However, there are obviously facets of the pandemic that people are unaware about, maybe this is how local regions are implementing their own prevention techniques, or successful recovery stories. Main news channels often have the bad habit of only broadcasting the negative effect of COVID-19 cases, whether it is a celebrity dying from it, or the mortality rates, or an extremely isolated and random case where a vaccine side effect led to death in a recipient. In the peak of the pandemic, they rarely reported on the success of treatment, which was actually quite widespread. Because of this, the public is only seeing one side to the pandemic, and it is almost never good. They need to be aware that the vaccine is actually very effective, with thousands of successful vaccinations with limited side effects.

 

It is necessary that the public knows how important it is to get vaccinated. Receiving the vaccine means not only protecting yourself, but also protecting the people around you. This includes those who are at an increased risk of complications or even death from COVID-19 or even those who cannot get vaccinated yet, like children or people suffering with debilitating conditions. It is important for everyone to know that vaccination is the most safe and effective way to prevent this disease and save so many lives. The people who cannot afford to get vaccinated depend on us to reduce the spread of the virus. I am hoping that one of the impacts of our presentation is that more of the lower vaccinated groups of the community are motivated to get vaccinated based on the questions we answer and information we provide to them. The main goal of our infographic is to show how receiving the vaccination will help the community, and stress the importance of it on an individual level as well as on the grand scale of the society.

 

I know there are a variety of different models that we could utilize to accomplish the same goal: we considered writing an article, making a commercial, or making an animation. In the end, we concluded on the infographic because it was short, succinct, and covered every possible avenue.

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