JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected Los Angeles County, with close to three million cases and over 32,000 deaths reported as of May 2022. Those most impacted by the pandemic in Los Angeles include Black and Latino populations that have had disproportionately high rates of infection and are nearly two to three times more likely to be hospitalized after contracting the virus. They have had the highest rates of COVID-related morbidity and mortality throughout the pandemic as they are two-and-a-half to four times more likely to die compared to White LA County residents.

Objective:

In April of 2021, we launched an initiative called VaccinateLA. The goal of VaccinateLA was to partner with local communities to understand barriers to becoming vaccinated, including vaccine hesitancy, and then develop a range of resources and a multimedia campaign to address these barriers and encourage and support vaccination. The University of Southern California (USC), its Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute (SC CTSI), the USC Keck School of Medicine, and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles focused this initiative on the communities with the lowest vaccination rates in areas surrounding the USC campuses, which included 34 zip codes in the Central, South, and East areas of Los Angeles. The three aims of VaccinateLA included: 1) design and implement an evidence-based mass media educational campaign to deliver tailored messages to Black and Latino population segments; 2) train and deploy Community Vaccine Navigators (CVNs) to deliver COVID-19 education, help overcome barriers, and facilitate vaccinations in high-risk communities in the East area and South LA; 3) assess the impact of these initiatives on attitudes and beliefs towards vaccine acceptance through formative and summative evaluations.

Methods:

A multifaceted public awareness campaign brought together fourteen different schools, departments, and institutes at USC, and drew upon community-participatory based research methods to incorporate and address community members’ attitudes and concerns in campaign content. The four campaign components were: listening-based activities; information-imparting activities; interactive-based activities; and field-based activities. Forty-two focus groups were conducted with community members and those data were used to inform the multimedia campaign. An evaluation is being conducted to evaluate the impact of the various components.

Results:

Based on the feedback obtained from the community, our multimedia campaign delivered evidence-based information using short #ShareYourWhy videos, storytelling using culturally tailored films, educational workshops/town hall events, a social media campaign, pop-up vaccination clinics, and Community Vaccine Navigators.

Conclusions:

The results of this analysis were used to develop a community-based health campaign from the University of Southern California that aimed to educate Los Angeles’ most vulnerable residents about COVID-19; and empower and encourage them to get their COVID-19 vaccine and booster shot through educational efforts, expert resources, mobile and virtual events.