Biden Admin to Start Sending Text Messages About Vaccines to Every American's Phone
The Biden administration is reportedly launching a new campaign to promote COVID-19 vaccines, sending text messages to nearly every phone number in the United States.
According to multiple reports, the White House has partnered with prominent social media platforms and technology firms, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and Snapchat, to disseminate the messages.
The initiative, slated to begin ahead of the Christmas holiday, will see the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) push out vaccination recommendations to hundreds of millions of cell phone users. It's the latest effort by the Biden administration to counter misinformation and promote vaccines, and comes as COVID-19 cases have risen sharply since the emergence of the Omicron variant.
It's unclear how the CDC will obtain the phone numbers to send the text messages, but the federal agency has access to cellphone data from several sources, including wireless carriers, Census Bureau surveys, and health research databases.
A U.S. official told the Washington Post that the CDC has compiled a list of cellphone numbers and will send text messages to the majority of U.S. adults, starting with a small trial run of hundreds of thousands of texts this week. The official said that a subset of the messages will include incentives for vaccinated individuals, but did not specify what those incentives might be.
Some of the texts will read: "Get vaccinated for COVID-19 for the protection of yourself and others. Vaccinations are free, safe, and effective. Visit COVID.gov for information about vaccines."
The Biden administration declined to comment on the effort.
While it's unknown how many of these messages will be sent, or how effective this strategy will be, experts say it's an important tool that can quickly reach wide audiences, especially in areas where Internet access is limited.
Given the CDC's expansive access to cellphone data, most U.S. adults without a prepaid phone number will likely receive these texts regardless of whether they are vaccinated.