New BCFG Vaccination Megastudy Published in Nature

A new BCFG megastudy published in Nature evaluated eight different behaviorally-informed text message reminders to boost vaccination rates among over 3.6 million CVS Pharmacy patients. Here’s what we learned:

• Experts and non-experts predicted that offering free round-trip rides to pharmacies for vaccines would more than double COVID booster rates in fall ‘22.

• But providing free Lyft rides to and from pharmacies in text reminders about boosters did no more for vaccination rates than sending vaccine reminders alone. 

• What did encourage vaccination? Overall, COVID vaccination reminders led to a  21% (1.05 percentage point) increase in COVID boosters and also “spilled over” to produce an 8% increase in flu shots. And we identified ways to improve the wording of standard reminders to make them a bit more effective.

• Here’s a visual of the message that yielded the largest estimated boost in COVID vaccinations (though notably, two other messages were statistically tied for “first place”):

Read our original research in Nature or check out this article in Penn Today or this piece by Cornell News summarizing our key takeaways.

This research was generously supported by Flu Lab, the Social Science Research Council’s Mercury Project (with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation), and the Wharton Behavioral Laboratory. We are also grateful for the broad funding support provided to BCFG by the AKO Foundation, John Alexander, Marc Leder, Warren Lichtenstein and Abby Schiffman and Jeremy Schiffman.