“Mimosas with the girls? You still aren’t vaxxed, Debra!”

       That reminder — laid across a melodramatic image of an exasperated man talking to a pouting “Debra” — has been making the rounds of the Internet over the past week.

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       And the Internet thinks it’s hysterical.

       The meme is part of a social media campaign by the Baltimore City Health Department, encouraging people — especially the young — to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.

       One Twitter user who shared the images — which also include “Connor” stuffing his face with leafy greens, in the misguided hopes of warding off the virus — received more than 136,000 likes and 28,000 retweets. The campaign has gained traction on Facebook and Instagram, garnered thousands of comments — from fans, critics and trolls — and, most importantly to its creators, been a tool to combat misinformation about the vaccine.

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       “This particular campaign is really steeped in, if you think this is funny, share it with your unvaccinated friends as a way to prompt them to talk to their doctor, or maybe talk to their family members who have been vaccinated and push that conversation forward,” said Adam Abadir, Baltimore City Health Department spokesman and one of the creators of the campaign.

       Since the onset of the pandemic, health departments around the country have turned to social media to send out updates and urge the public to stay home, socially distance and mask up. The Baltimore memes are one recent attempt in a broader effort to use pop culture to reach young people. Last month, President Biden welcomed 18-year-old pop star Olivia Rodrigo to the White House to encourage young people to get the shot.

       The health department first started posting the memes on social media in April, but they gained national attention over the past week after outside social media accounts started sharing the posts packaged together. The images in the campaign, like any good meme, all follow a set formula: an over-the-top stock photo overlaid with bright, bold text outlining an exaggerated argument about vaccinations.

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       “Still laughing at this, even though this can’t be real (can it?),” one Twitter user wrote about the posts.

       “We looked for the over-the-top, extra campy stuff, because it’s hysterical,” said Benjamin Jancewicz, social media and design consultant for the health department. “They’re trying to be serious and they’re just not.”

       While it’s hard to measure whether the campaign is driving more people to get vaccinated, Abadir said the memes have definitely increased engagement on the city’s social media platforms. The health department — which uses the username @BMore_Healthy, a play on the city’s name — gained almost 1,000 Twitter followers in the week since the campaign went viral, and the number of people interacting with posts on Facebook increased by almost 5,000 percent.

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       But the most exciting development for the social team was who many of their new followers were: young people.

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       “What we were doing was just showing up in spaces that we knew we needed to be in,” Abadir said. “It was always our intention to make people laugh. It was our hope that younger people would follow us.”

       Young people in Baltimore, like around the country, have lagged in vaccinations. While 68 percent of Baltimoreans between 35 and 59 years old have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, that number drops to 55 percent for 20- to 34-year-olds.

       “The average age of one of our followers is probably in their 30s. We wanted to bring that down a little bit, because we wanted to tap into audiences that hadn’t been listening to us first,” Abadir said. “So, we’re very excited about that aspect of the strategy, and it’s definitely bearing fruit.”

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       While the memes are funny, Abadir said the conversations depicted in them are inspired by real discussions they’ve heard online and in the community.

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       “We want to hold up a mirror to conversations that we knew people were having,” Abadir said. “People kept asking us: How do we have these conversations with our friends and family members?”

       Outside the memes, social media has been a key communications strategy for the health department, known for their “clapbacks” and banter with online followers.

       Ultimately, the social team sees it as a way to start conversations and drive people back to their page, where they post other informational content, such as the post pinned to the top of their Twitter page, a guide with facts about the delta variant called, “What the FAQ is Delta?”

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       “We want to be very clear about being open to being able to answer tough questions that are posed to us because we know that, especially as a government agency, there is legitimate mistrust,” Abadir said. “There’s legitimate fear out there, and we want to do our best to address that.”

       If they can make people laugh in the process, that’s even better.

       “We’re the oldest health department in the country,” Jancewicz said. “We earned a few bad jokes.”