New York, New York (December 18, 2020) – The Global Coalition on Aging (GCOA), the world’s leading business voice on aging, and science-based communications firm Novim today announced our innovative partnership – Alliance to Beat COVID (ABC) – to advance the goals of COVID-19 immunization for all. As two leaders in science and health strategy, Novim and GCOA are joining forces in our ABC campaign for an effective communication and education strategy that will help global society build trust in COVID-19 vaccines so that everyone around the globe will be confident and motivated to “get vaccinated.”

“There are five essential steps for the COVID-19 vaccine to work effectively: First, do no harm, ensure it is safe. Second, make sure it’s effective. Third, create sufficient scaled manufacturing to produce enough vaccine for all. Fourth, power a distribution system to get the vaccines to us. And fifth, get us to actually take it,” said Michael Hodin, CEO, Global Coalition on Aging.  “Stunningly, it is the fifth that will prove the greatest barrier as we see COVID-19 vaccine reluctance skyrocketing across our planet.”

Trust in the science of COVID-19 vaccine innovation follows a paradoxically well-known path where medicines generally, vaccines in particular and adult vaccines even more, are too often unused. According to a recent World Health Organization report, information, an enabling environment, social influence, and motivation influence vaccine acceptance. We live in a world in which, as the Annals of Internal Medicine reports, all medicine compliance is under 50%. For adult vaccines, it’s even worse, with only 37% of American adults vaccinated against the flu. The WHO reports that in the EU, just 60% of adults have received commonly recommended vaccinations, and in Australia, only half of the over-65 population has been vaccinated for flu and pneumococcal pneumonia. Even in super-aging Japan, where prevention and healthy aging are priorities for the population overall and rates of vaccine-preventable diseases like pneumococcal pneumonia are high, there persists remarkably low compliance. Compounding the reluctance further is the growing antivax and vaccine skeptics movements and the politicization of the COVID-19 vaccine.

“For our part,” said Michael Ditmore, Executive Director of Novim, “we will put our expertise in science, research, and analysis to evaluate and communicate on complex, complicated global scientific issues to the challenge of our moment – communicating the necessity and benefits of global immunization to Covid-19.”

For more information on the Alliance to Beat COVID, and how you can help, go to https://alliancetobeatcovid.org.

About Novim

Novim was founded in January of 2008 at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, at UC Santa Barbara, California with a mission to assemble teams of scientists to render complex issues comprehensible to non-scientists. These projects and studies are short duration efforts on a wide variety of subjects, delivering reports and web and mobile applications that help explain subjects ranging from nuclear power to pension reform to climate change.