This commentary proposes that public health agencies need to use simple, globally accessible messaging strategies and delivery platforms to communicate about COVID-19.

Novel public health communication interventions must grab the public’s attention, share information on platforms where people get their information, and disseminate reliable messages accessible to all regardless of language, age, or education level. This communication must occur quickly so there is less time for misinformation to manifest. Relying on best practices from communication theory, entertainment-education, and commercial animation, the authors share three important points to help health communicators with health messaging that they learned from their development of a wordless, globally scalable COVID-19 prevention animation:

1. Rapid design of broad-reaching health communication interventions is necessary and can be accomplished without sacrificing quality or accuracy of health messaging.
2. Distilling messages to their simplest form must be a priority.
3. Health messages can be made broadly compelling when globally deployable interventions are needed.