L.A. Care Health Beams In Mr. Spock to Promote COVID-19 Vaccination
Leonard Nimoy's image is part of a new billboard-based public health campaign.
L.A. Care Health Plan has teamed up with the family of Leonard Nimoy — the actor who played Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek — to promote efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Los Angeles-based health carrier is putting Nimoy’s image and Mr. Spock’s famous parting phrase, “Live Long and Prosper,” on one of the billboards it’s using to promote mask-wearing and use of COVID-19 vaccinations.
L.A. Care provides or administers health coverage for 2.3 million people in Los Angeles County.
Nimoy played Mr. Spock from 1964, when he appeared in Star Trek’s first pilot episode, “The Cage,” until 2013, when he had a role in “Star Trek Into Darkness.” His character was half human and half Vulcan. The inhabitants of the planet Vulcan prized logic, and Mr. Spock faced conflicts between his emotions and his desire to be logical.
Nimoy died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in 2015 at the of 83.
The Nimoy family offered to let L.A. Care use Nimoy’s image after seeing some of the company’s first COVID-19-related billboards.
Mr. Spock’s green, copper-based blood made the character immune to many of the infectious diseases that caused problems for the human characters on Star Trek, but Nimoy spent the last two years of his life promoting COPD awareness. The Nimoy family said they believe the actor would have been an outspoken proponent of mask use and vaccination.
Logical Thing to Do
ViacomCBS, which owns the rights to Star Trek, helped by letting L.A. Care use the phrase “Live Long and Prosper.”
The first billboard in the Live Long and Prosper campaign features a photo of Nimoy and an image of three masked people superimposed over a photo of the Earth. The tagline on the billboard is, “Live Long & Prosper.”
The message under the tagline is, “Get Vaccinated! It’s the Logical Thing to Do.”
L.A. Care will use the Live Long and Prosper message in a social media campaign at least until the end of the year, and digital posters with the same design as the billboard will be available for printing, the company says.