We are excited to provide this final report for our W.M. Keck Foundation COVID-19 Research funded initiative, called VaccinateLA.
VaccinateLA was launched in April 2021 with the goal of leveraging the enormous strengths, talent, creativity, and innovation that exists at USC to change the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in Los Angeles. Our funded grant had three specific aims:
1) Design and implement VaccinateLA, an evidence-based mass media educational campaign to deliver tailored messages to Black and Latino populations in the Eastside, South, and Central areas of Los Angeles.
2) Train and deploy Community Vaccine Navigators (CVNs) to deliver COVID19 education, help overcome barriers, and facilitate vaccinations in high-risk communities in the Eastside, South, and Central Los Angeles.
3) Assess the impact of these initiatives on attitudes and beliefs towards vaccine acceptance through formative and summative evaluations. A secondary aim was to expand our USC community partnerships on the Eastside and in South and Central Los Angeles, and to disseminate our VaccinateLA research findings and educational products to inform policy and support vaccination efforts outside of Los Angeles.
This progress report provides a summary of our accomplishments, which are exponentially greater than what we had hoped and expected to achieve. Our work over the last year was laid out in several phases. First, we engaged in listeningbased activities with community and with experts at USC and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) through focus groups with the former and symposia with the latter. Next, we partnered with the community to develop educational offerings that reflected the breadth and depth of what was asked for by the community residents, and evidence-based approaches recommended by our collaborators. These included educational town halls and workshops; multimedia and social media campaigns; and field-based activities, such as pop-up vaccination clinics in community settings (e.g., at churches, community events) and deployment of a vaccine navigators. Our phased- and community-based participatory approach resulted in:
● A 30% increase in the number of people vaccinated in our targeted VaccinateLA communities relative to other communities in Los Angeles County.
● The development and dissemination of 3 culturally tailored films and 50 short videos that increased intentions to take actions that lead to vaccination.
● Training of >400 community health workers/promotores in 38 US cities who, in turn, facilitated >500,000 vaccinations and >1,000,000 consultations address questions, concerns, and barriers to becoming vaccinated.
● Dissemination of credible and reliable vaccine information to over >46,000 people on our VaccinateLA.info website, where 40% of actions resulted in clicking on MyTurn.ca.gov to schedule vaccine appointment.