‘We All Need The D’ Says Hilariously Clueless Government Health Campaign

“We All Need The D,” announced a hilariously clueless public health campaign from the Yukon government.

The Yukon government was attempting to create an ad campaign that would encourage people to take vitamin D supplements recently, and it all went hilariously off the rails when Yukon Health and Social Services decided to try its hand at using some current slang. The Yukon Health and Social Services staff might be a little out of touch, but they did manage to produce a campaign that nobody will soon forget, after they released a series of posters of grinning, happy people smiling under the headline: “We all need the D!”

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Oops.

Yukon Health and Social Services spokesperson Pam Living told Yukon News that they did in fact know that ‘the D” is slang for “the dick,” when they made the ads, but that they did not know how everyone would react to them.

“We knew it was an innuendo for sex,” Living said. “We did not realize that it was as crude as it is now being purported to be.”

If Health and Social Services did know what “the D” means, it is difficult to see how else one is supposed to interpret a series of headlines like:

“We all need the D. Even me!”

“How do you do the D?

“Need a little help with your daily D?”

The seemingly unintentional double entendre made the photos even funnier. The models, at least, seem to be playing along.

According to BuzzFeed Canada, Yukon Heath and Social Services made up these charming posters in an attempt to remind people to take their vitamin D. That’s an excellent and important goal, which has been overshadowed by their wonderfully clueless campaign slogans.

The posters wound up online and immediately started going viral, because there is nothing in the world as funny as a person in a position of authority accidentally saying something dirty. By now Yukon Health and Social Services has removed all the posters from their website, walls, and inside some public buses, but unfortunately for them, the Internet is forever. These posters will never really go away. But that’s good, because maybe they can still help people.

Vitamin D deficiency is extremely common, especially in winter and in cold places without a lot of sun, because we get vitamin D from sunlight. Vitamin D helps our bodies absorb calcium, and it can be difficult to get enough vitamin D through food alone, so people who do not get a lot of sunlight are often advised to take a vitamin D supplement, or a multivitamin containing vitamin D.

Baby formula usually has vitamin D in it, but breast milk usually does not have enough for babies, so the CDC recommends that all breastfed infants get a daily vitamin D supplement.

Yukon Health and Social Services may have wound up looking a bit silly after this particular gaffe, but their campaign was designed to make people remember to take their vitamin D, and it almost certainly succeeded at that. I don’t think anybody who saw these posters will forget them for a long, long time. They might not be able to take vitamin D without giggling, but at least they’ll remember that vitamin D exists.