As the country continues to battle with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Major Organised Crime & Anti-Corruption Agency (MOCA) has added its voice to the call for Jamaicans to get vaccinated, in a new social media campaign dubbed “Trust the Facts, Get the Vax”. The campaign is aimed at encouraging persons to take advantage of the opportunity to get vaccinated, especially now that at least three of the approved vaccines are available in the island.
According to MOCA’s Director General, Colonel Desmond Edwards, the campaign evolved out of the need to help bolster the country’s efforts to slow and eventually end the pandemic. “The news coming out of the hospitals the last few days has been particularly sad and disheartening,” said Edwards. “In talking to some people in the communities, we discovered that a number of them were overwhelmed and tuning out altogether from everything COVID related, including messaging about vaccinations. That was when we decided to bring our communications team to the table, to see how we could impact the conversation around COVID.”
MOCA Press Officer, Detective Inspector Antoinette Morrison, said that after examining public sentiment around the vaccine, the team decided to adopt a positive, hopeful and upbeat theme. “We want people to be hopeful and optimistic because the vaccines give us hope and optimism”, said Morrison. “We felt that it was important to ensure that this was the tone, in order to re-engage those persons who were already overwhelmed by the news coming out of the hospitals.” MOCA’s campaign focusses on visualizing a post-pandemic Jamaica. The campaign makes the point that we can only get back to this life by vaccinating, and the sooner we do so, the better. In formulating the campaign, the team leaned heavily on Public Health communications best practice and by studying what some of the more vaccinated countries have been doing. Morrison notes that while the “Trust the Facts, Get the Vax” slogan was adopted from an international campaign slogan, the team believed that the message is enduring because “once you read and understand all the facts surrounding the vaccine then it becomes much easier to get in line for the jab.”
“While our mandate is to tackle corruption and major organised crime,” said Colonel Edwards, “MOCA is first and foremost, a corporate citizen of Jamaica and so we felt it was important for us to lend our voice and the talent of our people to the cause,” said Edwards. “We hope that persons will take the encouragement to get the COVID vaccine as soon as they can”.
MOCA achieved full independence on April 1 this year, and recently celebrated its seventh anniversary on August 4. The agency marked the occasion with a new corporate badge, new website and re-branded social media platforms. Persons are encouraged to view, like and share the “Trust the Facts, Get the Vax” campaign at twitter.com/mocajamaica, facebook.com/MOCAJamaicagov and instagram.com/mocajamaica.