New York-based nonprofit Black Health is running a new campaign for Black History Month in February.
The “Get Me Vaxxed” push is specifically aiming to boost COVID-19 vaccination rates among Black children in the U.S. from ages 6 months to 5 years old.
This comes after data out late last year from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that just 8.8% of 2- to 4-year-olds had at least one dose of a COVID vaccine.
But when that is broken down, as it was by a recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, this shows that in the majority of states collecting the data, far fewer Black 5- to 11-year-olds than white children in that age group had been vaccinated against the disease.
Black Health said in a press release it wants to reverse that trend and that as part of the new campaign, it will “target Black families using grassroots outreach as well as traditional and social media channels.”
The campaign also comes with a new website, set up in a comic-book-style design, that features a quick and easy way of finding a local place for a child to be vaccinated.
It also comes with a video from the CDC about what to expect during and after a vaccination as well as facts and figures about the low rate of vaccination in younger kids.
Currently, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s two mRNA vaccines are the only FDA-authorized shots for children in the age group Black Health is targeting, having nabbed green lights last summer.
“My upper arm bears a mark left by a life-saving vaccine I received back when I was an Alabama schoolgirl,” said C. Virginia Fields, Black Health's president and CEO, in the release. "With Get Me Vaxxed, we are centering our overriding determination that Black children will be protected against a disease that now is endemic, just like the flu is."