736: The Herd - This American Life (2024)

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.

Brian Castrucci

That was the group that we needed to reach out to, and we were doing a really poor job of it. And so go to the guy who knows that group. I mean, if I want really good bread, I go to a great baker. And so he was the great baker in this case.

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.

Brian Castrucci

You know, Frank's an institution. He has changed people's votes. He's changed people's political ideologies. I think Frank knows how to use words!

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?"

Frank Luntz

And I said, "Yeah, how about me?"

David Kestenbaum

This is Frank Luntz.

Frank Luntz

And they said, "Well, we figured you'd be too busy, but if you're interested, we would like you." Let me start again. By the way, I'm having-- I have good days and bad days, and this is a bad day, I will warn you.

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.

Frank Luntz

I have to think of how I enunciate. I have to fight-- I used to be confident in doing interviews like this. They were very easy for me. It was very simple. And it's not simple anymore. I realize when I sit, I sit with this hand clenched, and it doesn't look right. Even when I talk on TV, I tend to talk with my hands now in my pockets, because I don't want people to see that the hand doesn't work right.

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 sh*t about anything with the exception of what the American people think.

Frank Luntz

You all have two things in common-- you all voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and you all expressed at least some hesitation about getting the COVID vaccine. So you represent about 30 million people.

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.

Frank Luntz

Explain to me when you hear the word COVID, COVID-19, what word or phrase comes to mind?

Man

Controversy.

Frank Luntz

Sue?

Sue

Manipulation.

Frank Luntz

David.

David

Government manipulation.

Frank Luntz

Marie.

Marie

I would call it a hyped-up version of the flu.

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.

Woman

Wishy-washy.

Woman

Liar.

Woman

Puppet.

Man

Inconsistent.

David Kestenbaum

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

Frank Luntz

Adam, what do you think of first?

Adam

A miracle, albeit suspicious.

Frank Luntz

Patrick?

Patrick

Rushed.

Frank Luntz

Diane from Ohio.

Diane

Unproven.

Frank Luntz

Michael from Oklahoma.

Michael

Don't hold my freedom hostage.

Frank Luntz

And Jen from Iowa.

Jen

Untrustworthy.

Frank Luntz

Oh, my god.

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.

Jen

Yeah, he was in intensive care for three weeks.

Frank Luntz

So then why doesn't that lead you to get a vaccine as soon as possible?

Jen

Because I believe that our bodies naturally can fight off infections, although he did need assistance for his to end or to get better. I also understand people's perspective on how they believe in the vaccine, and it's totally the only way out of this deal. I respect that. But for us personally, I don't know. I really am highly undoubtful that we'll ever get vaccinated for this, even though it almost killed him.

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.

Brian

The virus is real, but everybody is ignoring the actual facts of the virus, the great media. If you're over 65 or if you're fat, you're much more likely to get the virus horribly and possibly die from it.

David Kestenbaum

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

Brian

And they totally ignored that. The media totally feeds on that and wants to sell that. And everybody that don't think, they just panic. And people that you thought were normally, sane, intelligent people were totally like, "Oh my god, I'm going to die from this virus."

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.

Man

Not a bit.

Man

Not a whole lot.

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.

Erin

Condescending. "We're all in this together." People are exhausted of that.

Man

Absolutely.

Woman

Absolutely.

Erin

Because we're not. We're not.

Man

Because we haven't been in it all together.

Erin

Their kids have gone to private school. We're not all in this together. And I hate when they act like we have been, because we haven't.

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.

Frank Luntz

Now, Tom is the most distinguished leader of the CDC in modern history. He will deny that introduction, but this guy knows his stuff.

David Kestenbaum

Frieden gave a pretty standard public health spiel.

Tom Frieden

Now, if you ask me, how can you know this isn't going to have a problem 10 years down the line, I don't. I can't tell you with certainty. But I can explain how the vaccine works.

David Kestenbaum

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

Woman

All true. Heard the science before, but it doesn't line up with what the response to the virus was on a federal level and a state level.

Frank Luntz

And therefore?

Woman

I'm not going to take a vaccine.

David Kestenbaum

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

Frank Luntz

I got my head in my hand. They can see me, so I had to be really careful. But I know that a couple moments, I went down, and I was doing texts at the time. And I actually said, "I'm done. This is going to fail."

David Kestenbaum

That's really what was going through your head.

Frank Luntz

That's half. OK, yeah. f*ck. I don't want to fail.

David Kestenbaum

Yeah.

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.

Bill Cassidy

And so I compare this to wearing a seatbelt. You don't think you're going to get in a wreck, but you're certainly glad if you happen to get in a wreck, that you're wearing the seatbelt.

David Kestenbaum

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

Kevin Mccarthy

President Trump got the vaccine. He got COVID, but he also understood--

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.

Frank Luntz

Doug says he wants facts. Let's go.

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.

Tom Frieden

One, if you get infected with the virus, it will go all over your body and stay there for at least a week and be much more likely to cause you long-term problems than the vaccine. Two, if you get the vaccine, it will prime your immune system, but then the vaccine is gone. It will not be with you anymore. Three, more than 95% of the doctors who have been offered this vaccine have gotten it as soon as they can. Four, the more we vaccinate, the faster we can get back to growing our economy and getting jobs. And five, if people get vaccinated, we're going to save at least 100,000 lives of Americans who would otherwise be killed by COVID.

Frank Luntz

OK, I want to show of hands. How many of you would say that those five facts are impactful to you?

Woman

Impactful. Yeah.

Frank Luntz

Wow. Wow, that's a lot of you.

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.

Chris Christie

Well, I think what I'd say to you is talk about three different experiences that I've had with COVID. And the point I want to try to make is how random it is. And as Patrick's saying, he had a cold for three days and didn't really feel all that badly. You all know how I got it. I went into what was supposed to be the safest place in America, the White House.

And I went, and I got tested every day as I walked in. I'm brought to the Eisenhower Building, swabbed, had to wait there for the test results to come back. If it came back negative, which they did every day that I was there, I could then go into the West Wing.

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.

Chris Christie

And there were seven people in the Map Room at the White House for about 16 hours over four days together. And of those seven people, six of them got COVID. In the place that was the safest, most tested place in America.

I got it, and Hope Hicks got it, and Kellyanne Conway got it, and the president got it. Bill Stepien got it. And Stephen Miller. All of us got it. All of us got it at a bit of a different time. And all of us got it at a bit of a different severity. And by randomness, I mean, I was the sickest of everybody, and had the longest hospitalization.

The next sickest person was the president. But the next sickest person after that was Hope Hicks, who was the youngest and most fit person in that room. Someone who, you know, ran four to five miles every day, in her early 30s, and was the most fit. She was out of it for a good 10 days, and never had to be hospitalized. But called me during it, and told me it was the sickest she'd ever been.

Two other people in my family, a 64-year-old cousin, who was a smoker. And so she had some potential problem, got it. Felt OK in the beginning, wound up hospitalized. Her husband, 63, no preexisting conditions, great shape. In fact, was still working every day as an active longshoreman on the docks in New Jersey. He got sick as well. Caught it presumably from his wife. They both wound up being hospitalized. And two weeks ago, they both passed away.

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."

Chris Christie

--politics. Politicians screw up almost everything we touch. We really do.

[LAUGHTER]

We just do.

Woman

That's the understatement of the century.

Chris Christie

Right? We just do. And so I understand why people are skeptical. But you know what? The scientists and the doctors are saying this is the right thing to do. So since I don't know anything about medicine, I'm going to follow their advice.

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.

Matthew

My biggest thing is like, these are great-- this is great information. It's just, how do we get this information out to-- to the public, especially us, you know, Trump voters and that the masses of us are going to believe it? And I don't think we're going to move everyone, but how do we get it out there?

David Kestenbaum

Here's Sue, who lives in Iowa.

Sue

I think what I've learned is, I probably need to separate my reaction to the government involvement in this, and look at just the science. I'm a pharmacist. I used to work for Merck. I know all their vaccines are good products. I trust them. What I don't trust is the government telling me what I need to do when they haven't led us down the right road, in my view, to this day. So if I can set the government aside and just look at the science and think about it from a medical standpoint, I think I'm OK.

David Kestenbaum

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

Woman

So I think my opinion has changed. Before I would have said I was in the middle of the fence on whether or not I would get the vaccination. And now, I'm leaning a little more towards getting the vaccination. So I probably went from a 5 out of 10 to maybe a 7 out of 10.

Man

I would say I was probably 80% against when this started today. Now I'm probably 50-50-ish.

Woman

Yeah, when I came in, I was 50-50. And I still want to know what's in it. I still want to find-- I want to know what's in the vaccine. I don't want-- I want to know what the ingredients are. But I'm probably about 80, 85% sure that I will get the vaccine.

Man

I was unlikely to get it unless I was forced to, to start with. So maybe 2 out of 10. And now I'm probably 9 out of 10 going to get it.

David Kestenbaum

Here's what Frank was thinking right then.

Frank Luntz

"f*ck, yeah." I mean, that's literally-- those were the two words I thought to myself.

David Kestenbaum

So a skeptic would say, OK, you've demonstrated-- what you've demonstrated here in this focus group is that if you get 20 people in Zoom with the former head of the CDC, a former governor, a senator, the leader of the Republicans in the House and another representative, then yes, you can move them, and to where they say they'll consider it. But you can't repeat that with millions of people.

Frank Luntz

That's the challenge that we have.

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.

Frank Luntz

These people have no problem speaking out. They have no problem saying no. And they did so all through the first half or 2/3 of the group. They rejected everything.

David Kestenbaum

Yeah, but at the end, they're all using kind of similar language. I was talking to someone about it. They're like, you know, that's actually a powerful thing, if that's what's going on there. Because that is how things really get going in the real world is, like, you know people around you who have gotten the vaccine. And so it becomes normal, and you think maybe I'll get it, too.

Frank Luntz

Absolutely. But they're trying to decide who to listen to.

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.

Frank Luntz

When they put that needle in my arm for the first vaccine, I really felt like this was the pain of life. And I am so grateful to our medical professionals, and so grateful to our pharmaceutical companies and American ingenuity. And I wish that you all could feel what I felt. Because this, to me, was the ultimate definition of freedom. It's the ultimate definition of liberty. It's the ultimate definition of the country that I'm so lucky to be born here.

Because I know you. I don't want to ever hear that anything happened wrong to you. So please be careful. Life is precious. Life is special. Let's do everything we can to preserve it. Thank you very much.

Woman

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Frank Luntz

Nice.

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.

Our website thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free. Also there's videos. There's lists of favorite shows. There's tons of other stuff there, too. Again, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, thanks as always to our program's confounder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he has been so dismayed lately about the politicization of the newspaper crossword puzzle ever since Joe Biden was elected. Don't get him started.

Man

There were words used like "communist" and "tyrant" and "fascist."

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.