PC2013: Vax Advocates: Addressing COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Through Youth-driven Educational Campaigns

Background: Significant inequities in COVID-19 vaccination persist in underserved populations. Adolescents are especially vulnerable due to vaccine misinformation, parental influence, and lack of medical autonomy. Community-based initiatives providing culturally appropriate information to adolescents are lacking. We designed Vax Advocates – a program to educate students about COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and promote health communication, advocacy, and project management skills. Vax Advocates collaborates with Dell Medical School’s Health Sciences Yearlong Academy (HYSA), a college preparatory program for Texas high school students. Vax Advocates’ unique yearlong curriculum consists of seven monthly workshops ranging from vaccine development to historical systemic healthcare inequities to effective health communication. The purpose is to support students in developing social media campaigns, school-based advocacy, and large-scale community outreach to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates in underserved communities. By leveraging these trusted relationships between students in Vax Advocates and their broader social networks, we create innovative student-led avenues for vaccine promotion.

Methods: Impact on COVID-19 attitudes is measured through data from pre and post-program evaluation. Students answer questions about receiving the vaccine, confidence in engaging community members in vaccine-centered discussions, and effectiveness of communication on social media platforms. Longitudinal comparative analysis will be performed by a Wilcox rank sum pair model. Additionally, a social media metrics survey will assess the outreach of the student educational campaigns. We hypothesize a statistically significant increase in students’ self-efficacy for engaging in critical vaccine-related discussions and community efforts following participation in our program.

Results: Pre-survey has shown that 45.5% of students have received one dose, and 45.5% have received their second dose. The remaining 9.1% have not received any vaccines and attribute it to parental refusal. 79% of participants trusted their family and friends for COVID-19 information, which is second only to their trust in official health organizations like CDC. This contrasts with social media platforms, which on average only 26.3% of participants trusted. Although 70% of students felt confident in talking about COVID-19 vaccines with family and friends, only 45% felt confident in addressing misconceptions. Only 30% felt confident in talking with people who have vaccine hesitancy.

Conclusion: Vax Advocates is a novel train-the-trainer curriculum that empowers adolescents as educators and advocates in their own community. Advancing teenager’s health communication skills and vaccine knowledge are viable means for engaging community members in local public health efforts. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, we envision similar partnerships with public high schools to improve COVID-19 vaccination and booster uptake rates. We believe these highly adaptable communication curricula are key to our ever-changing public health landscape, and that community-centered, student driven-advocacy can have a quantitative impact on achieving equitable health outcomes.