(AP) — A year after the COVID-19 vaccine became available, traditional public health campaigns promoting vaccination are often going unheeded. So an unconventional cadre of people has joined the effort.

In Germany, Lutheran pastors are offering COVID-19 shots inside churches. In Israel’s science-skeptical ultra-Orthodox community, trusted rabbis are trying to change minds. And in South Africa, undertakers are taking to the streets to spread the word.

They are opening sanctuaries and going door to door and village to village, touting the benefits of the vaccines and sometimes offering shots on the spot.

The funeral directors’ message: “We’re burying too many people.”

As the outbreak drags on into a third year, with the global death toll at 5.4 million, vaccine promoters are up against fear, mistrust, complacency, inconvenience and people who simply have bigger worries than COVID-19.

German pastor Christoph Herbst believes giving COVID-19 shots in surroundings that feel more familiar than medical settings may help. That’s why he and several other Lutheran pastors in the Saxony region contacted an aid group to offer shots inside their churches, despite sometimes violent anti-vaccination protests in recent weeks. Some pastors have been criticised and even threatened.

“We believe that we have a responsibility that goes beyond ourselves,” said Herbst, of St. Petri church in the eastern city of Chemnitz. “We’re not doctors and we’re not professionals. But we have the space and we have volunteers who can organize something like this.”

The Western-made vaccines have proved extraordinarily safe and remarkably effective overall at preventing COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations, and experts say that seems to be holding true even amid the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant. Health authorities warn that low vaccination rates are giving the virus more opportunities to mutate into new variants.