736: The Herd

Ira Glass

We all know how it is today. For most of the year, medical experts and government officials told us all to wear face masks. Half of us don't do it. Now that we finally have a vaccine, a third are hesitant to take it or say they definitely will not take it. But it wasn't always like this. Americans used to do what they were asked by medical authorities, mostly. Like when the 1918 flu pandemic hit the United States, killing similar numbers of Americans that COVID is killing today. Let's look at one American city that did a pretty good job minimizing deaths back then. Howard Markel writes about the history of American epidemics.

Ira Glass

Commissioner of health is the local official, usually a doctor, who tells everybody what to do when there's an epidemic or other health emergency. For instance, Max Starkloff closed schools. He ended public gatherings of all sorts. He ordered people who were sick to be quarantined. Dr. Starkloff was a good political operator.

Ira Glass

Howard says Dr. Starkloff had all kinds of messages, telling people to wash their hands, don't cough on others. And because medicine was so primitive back then, they hadn't actually isolated the flu virus. So they had no way to confirm if you had it. They couldn't test you. So the only way they could keep track of the disease was that people who were sneezing and sick told authorities. So Starkloff would tell the public--

Ira Glass

To be clear, not everybody was on board. There's pushback from the public in every American epidemic, Howard says. German immigrants rioted rather than get vaccinated in the 1880s. During the 1918 flu, 2,000 people showed up to protest a mandatory face mask law in California. But mostly, Howard Markel says, people complied. He says they trusted scientists more back then, even though scientists knew so much less than they know today.

And also, remember, 1918, the country was at war. It was World War I. So there's a lot of patriotic "let's all pull together" feeling in the country. But maybe the biggest reason that people listened to public health authorities back in 1918-- self-interest. Avoiding public gatherings, quarantines, that was about all you could do to protect yourself and your loved ones, given the state of medicine back then.

Most everybody knew somebody who'd died of an infectious disease, Howard says. Two of five babies died before their fifth birthday, many of them from infectious diseases. And Howard says epidemics were coming through every year or so, diseases we had no treatment for.

Ira Glass

This is before the age of antibiotics. That doesn't happen till the 1940s. Antivirals don't come till way after that. I think all of us living today, when so many diseases are treatable, I think we forget what a different world that was. Like for instance, if you got tuberculosis in New York City in the 1940s, they would send you to a TB ward to keep you from infecting anybody else.

I had a neighbor who was born in 1927, and she told me as a kid, when she got the disease, she was sent to one of those wards to live on the Upper West Side. The building's actually still there. She said they told her when she arrived, "OK, we don't know how to cure this, but we do know how to make you comfortable. Some of you live, and some of you die. Good luck."

Today, of course, things are so different. Howard Markel says there's never been an epidemic in America like the one we're going through right now.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, we have stories of public health experts trying to protect the public, telling us all to do things that will save our lives in this moment when unprecedented numbers of us are not obeying them.

We have two stories today. The first is about what it's like to do these jobs while getting so much pushback. The second, an expert on how to get through to Republican voters tries to convince them to take the vaccine, which is not easy.

WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1, Hazardous to Your Health Official.

So the way the system works in our country is that there are thousands of local public health officials in cities and counties across the country. In normal times, they test our drinking water. They make sure restaurants are sanitary. They enforce smoking bans, control mosquito populations in some places, run education campaigns, like nutrition programs for new mothers. The specifics vary a little from state to state, but you get the idea. They oversee health conditions.

And when there's a health emergency, like the outbreak of an infectious disease, they get special powers, broad powers to quarantine, close down businesses, do what's necessary to keep it from spreading. And they're obligated to take action. This past year, like I've said, the public that they're protecting has made all that a lot harder to do.

Keep in mind, these are not elected officials. They are public servants. They're government employees. Anna Maria Barry-Jester, a reporter with Kaiser Health News, has a story about two of these public health officials in Santa Cruz County in California, where she lives.

A heads-up before we start-- some things in this story may not be right for children to hear. Here's Anna.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

I've spent the last year talking to dozens of public health officials all over the country. I'd call to ask about COVID testing, contact tracing, or some other issue I was reporting on. And they'd often make an offhand comment about getting threatening calls in the middle of the night, or emails that had detailed photos of their house with messages like "Look out, we're coming for you."

Most of these public health people didn't want to go into detail about it on the record. It was too scary. They worried that it would only make them bigger targets. But these two officials in Santa Cruz County stood out, because they not only agreed to talk, they were unusually candid.

The first official I'm going to tell you about is Dr. Gail Newel. She's the county's health officer, sort of like the Fauci of Santa Cruz, but with more power. She writes the orders requiring masks, closing bars and restaurants. She's the public face of the COVID response. Gail is what you want in a health officer-- no nonsense, uncompromising. In meetings with elected officials, she's known for shutting them down if they ask her to do something she doesn't think is right.

She just says--

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

When the pandemic hit last spring, Santa Cruz County was a total success story. Gail ordered one of the country's first stay-at-home orders on March 16, when the federal government was still telling us not to wear masks and President Trump was suggesting COVID would just disappear with warmer weather.

While COVID case numbers and deaths shot up in New York New, Orleans, and Detroit, the numbers in Santa Cruz County stayed very low. But at public meetings, Gail started seeing a level of anger she hadn't seen before in her career.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

This guy pointed at Gail. Santa Cruz County is lined with beaches. It's a place with a boardwalk, and roller coasters, and a big surf scene. Gail closed them down to keep tourists away.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

In the spring, there were only a handful of COVID cases each week. Only two people in a county of more than a quarter million had died. But this crowd didn't see that as evidence of a job well done by Gail.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

The people going after Gail at these meetings were a small but vocal group. Many of them were from the north and central parts of the county, which are affluent and majority white. They weren't the people getting sick from COVID. Those cases were mostly in south county, which is majority Latino and where a lot of agricultural workers live.

Protesters were hijacking public meetings like this all over the country. Gail wasn't terribly concerned. She kept forging ahead with her job, giving press conferences and pulling all-nighters. Then in early May, the protests escalated from public to private. After weeks of getting nasty emails and voicemails from strangers, one Sunday Gail was taking an afternoon nap to recover from her 80-hour workweek. She called it her COVID Sabbath.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

They're singing "Gail to jail." This is from a video the protesters posted online.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

She called 911 twice but got a busy signal. So she called the sheriff on his cell phone. He sent patrol cars to her house.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

Protesters with ukuleles and flip-flops is very Santa Cruz. The county's about an hour south of San Francisco, with a stereotype as a crunchy, peace-loving, lefty paradise. But these protesters were aggressive. They broke down the gate to her neighborhood to get to her house. They showed up with bullhorns and sirens every Sunday for a month. The sheriff's department started sending regular patrols past Gail's house.

Then late in May, the next escalation happened at a public meeting in a packed room. A man started walking up to the podium, and then made a beeline for Gail and lunged at her.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

That's a county official evacuating the room.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

Two sheriff's deputies surrounded the man.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

Gail was now a public servant who could no longer appear before the public. She took the sheriff's advice to stop appearing in person at public meetings. She and the sheriff had a good relationship. She trusted his advice. And notably, he had enforced her lockdown orders. The county government had backed her up, too. Maybe that shouldn't sound remarkable, but it is. In some other parts of the country, sheriffs and local governments were publicly disregarding their health officials' orders.

The second health official I'm going to tell you about is Gail's boss, director Mimi Hall. If Gail's the Tony Fauci of Santa Cruz, always on TV, Mimi's the bureaucrat behind the scenes. She runs the entire health department, and has spent her whole 27-year career working in public health. She's a true believer, the kind of person who gets visibly excited talking about bureaucratic changes that make it easier to enroll in Medicaid.

And she navigated the threats she was getting differently from Gail. Gail tends to be pretty cut and dry. Mimi is the feelings person. She has empathy for people, even when they're yelling obscenities at her.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

Mimi was at that May meeting with Gail. On the one hand, she felt worried. But also, she wasn't sure what to make of it.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

Feeling silly or not, she did take some basic precautions. She started leaving her office at the county building every day by 7:00 PM. That's when security guards left for the day.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

All over the country, opposition to mask mandates and stay-at-home orders have been drawing together groups that didn't normally see eye to eye. Lefty radicals and right wing extremists, libertarians and mom groups, small business owners and anti-vaxxers, they started adopting each other's rhetoric. On social media, anti-vaxxers posed with rifles and offered firearms training. This all made the landscaper of who was lobbing the threats and what they were capable of even murkier and scarier.

In June, things got much worse. A colleague of Mimi's, a sheriff's deputy, was killed when he was out on a call. This happened less than two miles from her home in the Santa Cruz mountains. According to court records, a man linked to the Boogaloo Boys, an anti-government extremist group that wants to incite a civil war, shot at the deputy and other officers with an automatic rifle and threw a pipe bomb.

Before this man was arrested, he got hit with crossfire and used his own blood to write a "Boog" on the hood of a car. Mimi saw ambulances and police cars rushing to the scene, and was stunned to find out that the alleged gunman lives so close to her and was an active duty sergeant in the Air Force. He's pleaded not guilty to murder.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

Mimi urged Gail to get security cameras, and couldn't believe how long it took her to install them. When the sheriff recommended they both get guns and firearm training, Mimi brought home a shotgun and built gates across her driveway. Gail didn't get a gun. Here's what Gail said about that decision.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

There's a privacy law in California that shields the home addresses of domestic abuse survivors and abortion providers. Last year, the governor expanded it to public health officials. Mimi signed up. Gail did, too. The fact that it all got to this point surprised Mimi. She'd moved to Santa Cruz because she saw it as a refuge for her family.

They used to live in Plumas, a politically conservative and white county in northern California. She ran the public health department there, and was constantly fighting with officials, especially when she had to roll out Obamacare. She told me they were also dealing with a lot of racism. She and her kids are Burmese American. They all hoped for a more peaceful life when they moved to liberal Santa Cruz. I talked to Mimi about this.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

The majority of local public health officials in the country are women. I've talked to lots of them, and there's a recurring pattern. The harassment and threats they've been getting this year come almost exclusively from men. They're regularly called bitches and threatened with death. Their children and spouses are called out by name. Armed men have openly carried weapons outside of some of their homes.

I didn't hear about that kind of harassment at all from their male colleagues. In the county next door to Santa Cruz, Santa Clara County, a female health officer got a steady stream of anonymous hate mail and death threats police believe came from a man with suspected ties to the Boogaloo Boys. Some of the letters had a Santa Claus stamp and an igloo, which is a known symbol for the movement.

He included pornographic images of women and called her a "Hitler bitch." Then in July, about a month after the Sheriff's deputy was killed, Mimi got a letter with a Santa Claus stamp, too. Police believe it's from the same man.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

She immediately called the sheriff's department and spoke with a deputy.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

Shortly after, officers arrested the guy after they watched him drop another letter in the mail. When they searched his home, they found 150 firearms, including semi-automatic rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and materials for explosives. He's pleaded not guilty to charges of stalking and threatening a public employee.

After the Santa Claus letter, Mimi basically stopped leaving her house. She wouldn't even go to her kid's school events on Zoom, in case the other parents recognized her. And when she did have to go to the grocery store, she went incognito-- mask, hat, messy ponytail. A sheriff's patrol car started keeping watch, parking in front of her house.

She was getting threatening emails, angry phone calls in the middle of the night. I asked her if any of the threats she got were racist, given all the attacks against Asian-Americans this year. And she said no, just sexist. She was having trouble sleeping, bringing her laptop into bed every night. She gained 30 pounds and started taking blood pressure medication for the first time in her life.

On bad days, she thought about quitting. She'd do what she calls retirement math, a trick she learned from another health official, to remind herself that she could quit any time and still get her pension.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

In the battle between these willful public servants and the mob, Mimi and Gale never blinked. They've kept their misgivings to themselves. They've both toughed it out and stayed in their jobs. When the county furloughed employees, they worked through it to make sure vaccines got out. And they've gotten a lot done. It's clear they saved a lot of lives by locking down early.

But the thing they were trying so hard to prevent did eventually happen. In the fall, cases started to climb when the state loosened restrictions on restaurants and businesses and holiday gatherings began. Nursing homes in Santa Cruz got hit for the first time, causing the death rate in the county to spike. This was devastating to Gail and Mimi. They were seeing more deaths in a single day than they had in the first six months of the pandemic combined.

There's this one press conference that Gail held last year that I still think about, because it feels indicative of where we are as a country right now. When Gail closed the beaches, lots of people ignored the order and went anyway. They threatened and harassed the officers who tried to enforce it. That weighed on Gail, especially after the deputy was killed. So she decided to reopen the beaches. She didn't think the security risk to the officers and to her was worth it anymore, especially if people weren't going to listen anyway.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester

"People are not willing to be governed," at least not by officials who ask them to make sacrifices for their neighbors. And as a result, the officials, trying to govern us are quitting in droves. Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 250 public health officials working in communities all over the US have left their jobs, many because of threats and political pushback.

Nearly one in six Americans now lives in a community that has lost its local health department leader during the pandemic, officials like Mimi and Gail. It's the largest exodus of health officials in US history.

Ira Glass

Anna Maria Barry-Jester, she's a reporter from Kaiser Health News. More things happened, by the way, to Gail and Mimi than we can fit into our story, and it tells those things in the version that she wrote for Kaiser Health News. That's at khm.org.

[MUSIC - JOY AGAIN, "LOOKING OUT FOR YOU"]

(SINGING) I guess should stop looking out for you like I always do. Start looking out for me, too. Instead of leaving me staring at my shoes.

Coming up, one bold man sits down with a bunch of Republicans who emphatically do not want the COVID vaccine and tries to figure out exactly what to say to them to get them to change their minds. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, you can't get herd immunity until you deal with the herd and get enough of the moving together in the same direction, which has been difficult this past year in a way that it's never been during any epidemic in our history.

Today, we have stories of people trying to steer the herd that is us. We've arrived at Act 2 of our program, Act 2, the Elephant in the Zoom.

So in the early part of the pandemic, it seemed like the hard part to ending this might be developing a vaccine. That part basically worked out. We got several in record time. But it turns out there's another hard part. Tens of millions of people in the United States are not sure they want to get the vaccine. One group that's particularly true of-- people who voted for President Trump.

According to one poll, 40% of people who voted for President Trump said they did not plan to get the vaccine compared with 8% of people who voted for President Biden. David Kestenbaum has this next story about somebody trying to find something, some word, some fact, some story that can convince Trump Republicans to see this differently and get themselves vaccinated. Here's David.

David Kestenbaum

The whole thing started with this public health institute in Maryland called the de Beaumont Foundation. They'd been noticing with alarm that not only were Trump voters reluctant to get the vaccine, they were stubbornly so. Other hesitant groups seemed to be coming around to getting the vaccine, but not the Trump voters. The numbers in surveys hadn't budged in months.

The head of the foundation, Brian Castrucci, realized, basically, we need someone who speaks Republican.

David Kestenbaum

The great baker? Frank Luntz, the pollster who is on TV and Fox News all the time. He'd been tracking and trying to understand the Republican electorate for decades.

David Kestenbaum

Brian was aware of the odd couple nature of this potential pairing. He says the public health community tends to be left of center. Frank Luntz was certainly good with words, but in a way some liberals hated him for. In the '90s, he was one of the people who worked on Newt Gingrich's Contract with America. He helped rebrand the estate tax as a death tax, and advised Republicans to use the words "climate change" instead of "global warming," because it sounded less alarming.

The phrase "government takeover of health care" for Obamacare? That came out of one of his focus groups. Basically, he was one of the people that had helped create the very polarization that was now one of the reasons people weren't getting vaccinated. But for Castrucci's purposes, what better person? So he tweeted at Luntz, kind of coyly. "Know someone who might be able to help?"

David Kestenbaum

This is Frank Luntz.

David Kestenbaum

Frank had a stroke a year ago in January, which is actually one of the reasons he wanted to work on this. The experience made him really angry with all the people who weren't getting vaccinated. He says the stroke was this thing he probably could have prevented if he'd done what the doctor said. But he didn't take care of himself, didn't take his medication. And now, seeing people do some version of that, not protecting themselves by getting the vaccine, endangering themselves and others, it was driving him crazy. Like, you people are healthy. You don't realize what you have. The stroke affected his left arm and his speech.

David Kestenbaum

So he was in a different spot than usual when the de Beaumont Foundation reached out to him. Frank told the foundation what he'd like to do-- get together a group of Trump Republicans who were reluctant to get the vaccine, a focus group like Frank had done so many times. But he wouldn't just ask them their opinions. He set out as a goal in an hour and a half, he was going to try to change their minds, convince them to get the vaccine.

He figured, if he could do that, he'd learn how to do it for the millions of other Trump Republicans out there. Frank had a bit of a strategy, but he says these things involve a lot of improvisation. He doesn't write questions out in advance. He runs his focus groups in a state of kind of hyper-awareness. He says the main thing he tries to do is really listen to what people are saying, but also the words they're using, the way they're talking.

And at the same time he's listening, he's also trying to read the reactions of everyone in the room, whether they're looking up or down or fidgeting. He thinks he's done thousands of these things over his career. He once told a reporter, I don't know shit about anything with the exception of what the American people think.

The experiment took place over Zoom on a Saturday afternoon last month. There were 20 people he was going to try to sway, mostly white, middle-aged, everyone in their little boxes on the screen, a bookshelf or a desk or a plant in the background. Below each person-- first names and state. Debbie from Georgia, Doug from California, Lisa from Ohio, Patrick from Tennessee, all recruited by Frank's team. Frank was very clear at the start about how they'd been selected.

David Kestenbaum

But as soon as he got into it, Frank suspected there was a problem. The participants had said when they were recruited that there was some chance they would get the vaccine. But a lot of them seemed like they might actually be firm no's. He wondered if they had said they were maybes just because they didn't want to come off like anti-vaxxers. Frank says that's how they feel they get portrayed in the press. If they weren't maybes but were really no's, this was not going to work.

David Kestenbaum

It was alarming, he said. He'd asked them about a disease, and their answers were all about politics. Here they are on Tony Fauci, the White House's chief medical advisor.

David Kestenbaum

He asked them about the thing he was hoping to sway them on, the vaccine.

David Kestenbaum

To be clear, COVID is much more deadly than the flu, and the vaccine has gone through extensive testing. Maybe the most worrying moment for Frank, a woman named Jen just kind of let drop this thing. She said her husband had almost died from COVID.

David Kestenbaum

I want to say right here, I wasn't allowed to talk to any of the participants. Which I wanted to do. I don't want them to come across as soundbite clichés. They were willing to put themselves out there, and they spoke pretty candidly. So I want to take a minute here to try to give you a sense for some of the things they said over the session, about why they were reluctant to get the vaccine.

Lots of people said they were worried about the long-term side effects from the vaccine. Lauren, a teacher in New Jersey, said she just didn't feel comfortable with the idea of something so new being injected into her body. An older man said, my fear of the vaccine is more than my fear of getting the illness.

And just to say, the concern about side effects, that's one lots of hesitant groups have. It was the top reason in a survey of Black Americans and in a survey of people in six Latin American countries. One person in the focus group, but only one, cited concerns he'd heard from a couple of anti-vax doctors.

They'd clearly heard mainstream health messages about the vaccine. They'd encountered that stuff. But it was mixed in with so many other things they disagreed with. They thought the press didn't always put things in proper perspective when covering the pandemic. Here's Brian from Texas.

David Kestenbaum

But if you're not, he says, you're at way less risk of dying.

David Kestenbaum

At some point, Frank showed everyone a PSA by the Ad Council that totally bombed, featured former presidents, including George W. Bush but not President Trump, though even that wouldn't have helped.

David Kestenbaum

At the end, the ad urged people to, quote, "do their part." Erin, who lives in Florida, said when people make that kind of argument, it bugs her.

David Kestenbaum

And finally, underlying all this, politics. Many said they felt like Democrats had exaggerated COVID so they could use it to defeat President Trump. Some wondered if the drug companies had delayed releasing the vaccine results until after the election. The head of Pfizer has said he would never do that. I asked Frank what he thought the problem would be that he'd have to overcome? "I thought the problem was going to be everything," he said. That turned out to be right.

About a half hour in, Frank switched from listening to actually trying to persuade them. Here he did have a plan. He'd lined up a bunch of high profile guests who were just going to drop into the Zoom meeting. Frank put them in a particular order. He wanted the first person to be someone who really knew about the vaccine in detail. Though his choice for this seemed like maybe an odd one, Dr. Tom Frieden, the head of the CDC under Obama. Frank didn't introduce him that way.

David Kestenbaum

Frieden gave a pretty standard public health spiel.

David Kestenbaum

Frank went around for a reaction, to see how it had gone.

David Kestenbaum

At some point during this whole thing, you can see Frank look down.

The head of the de Beaumont Foundation that was paying for this, Brian Castrucci, felt nauseous at this point. He told me he actually pulled over a trash can. It seemed like nothing was going to work. Frank had reinforcements. Next up were the politicians, all supporters of President Trump, who presumably these voters might like and listen to. Frank said when he reached out to them, they were game, but were like, can you give us some talking points? Frank told them to just be themselves. The whole point was to just try stuff and see what might work.

First up was Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, who's also a doctor. He offered a seatbelt analogy.

David Kestenbaum

Then Kevin McCarthy joined the Zoom, the top Republican in the House of Representatives.

David Kestenbaum

Brad Wenstrup, a congressman and doctor, also tried. And pieces of what they said did seem to resonate and loosen things up, but it didn't feel like anyone had really moved. Frank said he thought this part would have gone better. One of the surprising takeaways from the session was just how ineffective messages about the vaccine are when they're coming from politicians.

I've watched the recording of this whole focus group several times, trying to figure out the moment things started to shift, and why. Something happened just after this that took Frank by surprise. Frank went back to Tom Frieden, who had run the CDC for so long. He's a physician, not a politician. Frank says there's an order in which things need to be communicated to move someone. And he thought now they were ready for facts.

One woman in the group said basically emotions work for Democrats, we want facts. It came up a bunch.

David Kestenbaum

Frieden had been listening, and it was like he'd been collecting all the concerns and questions he'd been hearing and lining up responses in his head. And in one minute, he just spit out these five things he wanted everyone to know as clearly as he could.

David Kestenbaum

Frank says in his experience, there's kind of two things you need to move someone. Two components to a person making a decision. They're the facts, which they now had. The other one is actually the thing they seem skeptical about, emotion. And that is what the last person to speak delivered.

This last guest Frank didn't know what he was going to say exactly, but he put him last intentionally-- former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie didn't give a speech. He didn't try to persuade them to get the vaccine. He just kind of said, here's what happened to me. Maybe you'll find it useful. I'm going to play you a bunch of what he said.

David Kestenbaum

Christie was the first person to tell an actual story. I hadn't heard all the details before. This all happened when he was helping prep the first presidential debate.

David Kestenbaum

It wasn't hard to read the room. Everyone was paying attention. One person said, "I wasn't expecting him to say that, that they had passed away." Two were surprised to hear that Hope Hicks ran four miles a day and had still gotten so sick. Christie told them he sympathized with their skepticism about politicians on this issue. Like the presidents in that vaccine PSA, "Listen," he said. "I know all those people. I've met all those people. I'm not asking them whether I should take the vaccine."

David Kestenbaum

The session ran long, to almost 2 and 1/2 hours. And maybe it was the accumulation of everything they had heard, but suddenly after Chris Christie, it was like they were in a different world. This is Matthew, who lives in Michigan. He said he'd heard a lot of this stuff before, but somehow it was landing differently. At the beginning, he had been 90% against getting the vaccine. He'd completely flipped.

David Kestenbaum

Here's Sue, who lives in Iowa.

David Kestenbaum

Frank went around to everyone to see where they started and where they ended up, and they had all moved.

David Kestenbaum

Here's what Frank was thinking right then.

David Kestenbaum

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about focus groups. There are movies that test well in focus groups but bomb at the box office. And Frank hasn't followed up to see if any of the people have actually gotten the vaccine, though he says he will. I asked him about that moment at the end. Wasn't it possible people were just being swayed by the person who'd gone before them, that he was getting some form of groupthink and not actual change? He didn't think so, not with this group.

David Kestenbaum

Here's what Frank said he learned from the whole thing. The basic facts really did matter, but they needed to be presented in the right way. One participant put it like this. "We want to be educated, not indoctrinated." And also, you need the right person to deliver the facts. And Frank thinks the most persuasive messenger is probably people's own doctors.

I talked to a researcher who studies vaccine hesitancy, who totally agreed about this. Getting a vaccine, some foreign thing injected into your body, that's a medical decision. And for a lot of people, the person they trust for that isn't the president, or some celebrity, or the TV news. It's their doctor, who they've chosen, who, if you're over a certain age, you've probably been through some real stuff with. They know the facts, and they're a person you might have an emotional connection to.

Again, those two ingredients-- facts and emotion. Frank's dream is that doctors will reach out to their patients, maybe record a video of themselves on their laptop or phone, and send it out.

There is an ad in the works, based on this focus group. It'll feature a celebrity who plays a doctor on TV, like Gray's Anatomy or The Good Doctor, but appearing with their own actual doctor, talking about the vaccine. Which, who knows, this group seems skeptical of any kind of preproduced persuasion.

For me, maybe the most remarkable thing about this little experiment is the simple fact of how it ended up. Over two hours, some thing or combination of things did seem to move people. It really could have failed, but it didn't. At the end, there was one final person to talk, who hadn't really said a lot in the focus group up to this point. It was Frank, who talked about the moment he did the thing that he was hoping they will all do.

David Kestenbaum

Frank told me he's gotten emotional in focus groups before, but usually it's him yelling. This was a first.

Ira Glass

David Kestenbaum. He's our program's senior editor.

[MUSIC - MARGO GURYAN, "PLEASE BELIEVE ME"]

(SINGING) Please believe me. I never lied. I only tried and tried and tried to make you understand. I didn't explain at first, but that was for you. You might have believed the worst, and the worst wasn't true. I did, I did, I swear. I did it all for you.

Our program was produced today by Miki Meek, and Aviva deKornfeld, Anna Maria Barry-Jester from Kaiser Health News as our guest editor. People who helped put out show together they include Susan Burton, Ben Calhoun, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Damien Graf, Chana Joffe-Walt, Seth Lind, Lina Misitzis, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Ari Saperstein, Robyn Semien, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Julie Whitaker.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Jim Hart, Michelle Smith, Lauren Weber, Hannah Recht, Kat DeBurgh, Marm Kilpatrick, Katie McMahon, Alex Moehring, David Lazer, Crystal Son, Amanda Moss, and KZSC radio at Uc Santa Cruz.

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Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - MARGO GURYAN, "PLEASE BELIEVE ME"]

(SINGING) Please believe me. You'll never get rid of someone, who did. He did. I swear, I did it all you.