Produced by The Angeles Company in partnership with the Filipino Young Leaders Program (FYLPRO)'s Tayo, “Mag Vax Tayo” is a comedic and heartwarming Filipino-American vaccine confidence campaign told through three interconnected stories that showcase family, faith, and flair.
From the stubborn Tito Boy who is shaken by a surreal wake-up call—to a hesitant Tita Flor—who turns her fears into laughter thanks to Nurse Mary—and a dramatic showdown between trendy titas who realize that the ultimate status symbol is good health, these vignettes celebrate the resilience and humor of the community.
Packed with Filipino laughs, familiar trends, and relatable characters, Mag Vax Tayo reminds us that protecting ourselves and our loved ones isn’t just common sense—it’s an act of love, faith, and family pride.
Mag Vax Tayo includes a series of three videos which all tackle vaccination.
Tayo began in winter 2020, when a group of Filipino Young Leaders Program (FYLPRO) alumni saw how our kababayans were sharing dangerous COVID-19 home remedies spread through family group chats. We built Tayo, Tagalog for "we" or "us," to close three gaps: services, reliable in-language information, and data about a community routinely aggregated into "Asian American."
"Mag Vax Tayo" applies five years of that trust building to a hard problem: vaccine confidence in a community that staffs America's hospitals yet is rarely spoken to directly. Filipinos are 1 percent of the US population but 4 percent of its nurses. Institutions tell our elders to get vaccinated; almost no one speaks to them in their own humor, faith and family idiom.
Plan of action: We started from what our community told us. Tayo's "ask a question" intake surfaced vaccine safety concerns as early as November 2020, a month before the first authorized vaccine. That listening infrastructure plus more than 500 vetted bilingual questions and answers taught us that reactive fact-checking fails, because misinformation resonates emotionally. So we made emotion the vehicle: comedy, teleserye melodrama, intergenerational family dynamics.
Execution: We partnered with The Angeles Company, the Telly Award-winning Filipino American duo Meriden and Steve Angeles, and held an open casting call in August 2025 for Los Angeles local Filipino actors who could carry a Filipino accent or Tagalog. We shot in North Hollywood on September 9, 2025, and released the campaign October 13, 2025 timed to fall respiratory season and Filipino American History Month.
The result is three interconnected vignettes: "Tito Boy's Wake Up Call," in which a stubborn brandy-loving tito (uncle) is shaken by a surreal dream; "The Latest Trend," where glamorous titas (aunties) discover the ultimate status symbol is good health; and "Betting on Your Health." Characters were written from life: Tita Flor clutching her rosary, Nurse Mary's deadpan approach, Maxine cutting through family drama. Every video is in three cuts (clean, long intro, captioned) so partners can drop them into Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, in-clinic screens and community events.
Challenges: Vaccine fatigue and a hardening national climate around science meant a straight public-health message would be scrolled past. We answered with laughter rather than lecture. Our audience is intergenerational and code-switching, so we cast for bilingual delivery and captioned everything rather than producing separate English and Tagalog versions. As an all-volunteer, grassroots organization, we had no broadcast budget so we built for distribution through the community's own networks, the same closed family chats where misinformation travels.
What makes it unique: Most vaccine campaigns translate. “Mag Vax Tayo” was written from inside the culture, cast from the community, and grounded in five years of first-party data on what Filipino Americans actually ask. It is our third vaccine PSA campaign, after 2021's bilingual and dance PSAs for "We Can Do This" and the 2022 fellows' TikTok booster series.
Our objective was never a single vaccination statistic. It was to make vaccination feel like a Filipino act of love, and to prove a volunteer-run diaspora newsroom can produce culturally tailored public-health media at professional quality. By that standard, “Mag Vax Tayo” succeeded on three fronts.
Cultural resonance: The campaign put Filipino Americans on screen as protagonists rather than background healthcare workers, in a teleserye our elders already love. Viewers recognized their own titos and titas, which is the recognition that makes a message survive a family group chat.
Community ownership: The open casting call turned production into participation: LA Filipino actors became messengers to their own networks. Releasing every spot in clean, long-intro and captioned cuts let clinics, community organizations and media redistribute at no cost, extending reach far past what our budget could buy.
Institutional capacity: Delivering a broadcast-quality, three-part narrative campaign as an all-volunteer organization with an award-winning production partner showed Tayo has matured from a help desk into community health infrastructure and capacity that carries forward to mental health and vaccine hesitancy.
The deeper measure of success is trust. Tayo earned it by answering questions before institutions knew to ask them, and "Mag Vax Tayo" reinvested it and proving that most effective counter to health misinformation is not correction, but a story the community recognizes as its own. This was also validated when Tayo showed these videos beyond a Filipino American audience but also a Filipino Canadian audience which immediately resonated all in the same places.
