Trump Administration Plans a Rushed Effort to Encourage Americans to Be Vaccinated

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration, scrambling to make up for lost time after a halting start, is rushing to roll out a $250 million public education campaign to encourage Americans to take the coronavirus vaccine, which will reach the first patients in the United States this week.

Federal officials acknowledge the effort will be a complicated one. It must compete with public doubt and mistrust of government programs amid deep political divisions created in part by a president who has spent much of the year belittling government scientists, promoting ineffective treatments and dismissing the seriousness of the pandemic — and is now rushing to claim credit for a vaccine that he has made a priority.

“When you have an anti-science element together with a divisiveness in the country, it will be challenging,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said in an interview on Friday, while declining to talk specifically about President Trump. “But you know, we’ve done challenging things before.”

The Building Vaccine Confidence campaign, overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, will unfold in an atmosphere of hope as vaccinations begin — but also despair as daily death tolls from Covid-19 approach 2,500 and the United States nears 300,000 total deaths. The campaign is part of a broader public relations effort that was initially supposed to feature celebrities whom the administration considered friendly to the president but came under scrutiny from Democrats who called it propaganda intended to re-elect Mr. Trump.

The celebrity component — which was to include the actor Dennis Quaid and the country singer Billy Ray Cyrus — was scrapped after an inquiry by House Democrats prompted Alex M. Azar II, the health secretary, to order an internal review of the plan. The new initiative will take a “science-based approach,” said Mark Weber, the federal health official who is running it, and will begin this week with a first wave of advertisements in print, social media and radio, with television advertising added when the vaccine becomes more broadly available.

Mr. Azar’s review, which concluded on Nov. 13, put the campaign on hold for six weeks. Now, with vaccinations beginning, and the department scheduling a national ceremonial kickoff event featuring some of the first ones on Monday afternoon, the campaign is on an extremely tight timeline. Focus groups devised to help officials fine-tune the advertising to tailor it to hard-hit communities will begin on Tuesday. ...