Enhancing Catastrophic Event Preparedness and Response: The Inoculation Approach

Catastrophes, often accompanied by loss in life and property, affect millions of people with their devastating consequences. In response, leaders and practitioners have turned their attention to the scientific community in search of evidence-based strategies and approaches capable of mitigating the potential calamitous effects of catastrophic events. This effort has identified a number of promising strategies capable of ameliorating the manifestation and outcomes of these catastrophic events. Inoculation-based strategies present one such promising approach due to their proven modality-neutral efficacy. The ability to disperse inoculation messages through social networks in both traditional and terse formats and then further boost the achieved efficacy using multiple different inoculation-message formats positions inoculation as a strategy of significant import in the effort to successfully manage the potentially devastating effects of catastrophic events.