Vaccination: Paying skeptics to get shots
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is giving the state’s vaccine holdouts a million reasons to take a jab, said Hayes Brown in MSNBC.com. Last week, he announced the “Vax-a-Million” lottery, in which five randomly drawn state residents will win $1 million prizes—“so long as they’re vaccinated.” It’s not the first carrot dangled in front of the vaccine-hesitant. New Jersey is offering free beer to those who get a shot, Mainers can claim $20 L.L. Bean gift cards, and New York offers free Mets and Yankees tickets. It “may seem desperate,” but with vaccination rates steeply declining and endangering our chances of reaching herd immunity, it’s time to pull out “any and all efforts”—including cash incentives. In a UCLA study, a third of unvaccinated respondents said they’d roll their sleeves up for $100. “Bribing the masses” may work.
We need to treat holdouts “like adults, not children,” said bioethics professor Nancy Jecker in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Inoculating people is an urgent goal, but manipulating the poor in particular with money they need is “coercive” and unethical. “There are better, less intrusive alternatives,” such as outreach efforts that approach the skeptical “with a willingness to listen and try to understand their reasons,” rather than using a financial cudgel. Bribery is also unlikely to make much difference, said David von Drehle in The Washington Post. Years of data show “mixed results, at best, in programs offering cash incentives to improve health,” such as paying people to lose weight, give up smoking, or get tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
Even limited success could make a big difference, said Colin Gabler in The Columbus Dispatch. While some holdouts are hard-core anti-vaxxers, others are just “apathetic” about getting a shot, whether because they don’t like needles, already had Covid, or “the CVS is too far a drive.” Such people “may be nudged by a $100 payout,” meaning that for $3 billion we could get another 30 million people vaccinated and “move the needle on herd immunity.” That would be “a bargain.” As a society, we “pay indirectly for each other’s poor health choices in the long run,” said Jacob Appel in The Baltimore Sun. Better to pay people now to acquire immunity to Covid to “save their lives and protect their neighbors.” If we don’t, “we may find ourselves soon paying the price of inaction.”