Thanks!
I was thinking of more prosaic help though - putting clinics in under vaccinated zip codes, on a bus line, with hours matched to when people in that neighborhood are off work, taking walk-ins rather than needing an appointment, having trusted community partners do the recruiting, have medical translators for the right set of languages,etc.
Yeah that feels like too much. Why not do a weekly draw for smaller prizes and a grand prize one million dollar draw at the end?
For example, my kid’s school district has organized vaccination clinics at 39 schools, starting Monday, now that 12+ are eligible.
I’m pleased that they’re making sure every eligible student can get vaccinated, but it would be even better if they had a “bring a guest” policy. In the fall the ran flu vaccination clinics that were open to all members of a student’s household. It was close, it was convenient and we got the whole family done at once.
mid-April when the U.S. averaged 3.38 million doses administered per day across a week, the current seven-day average is 2.19 million doses per day
Perhaps they could call this the Darwin Award!
Or a gun raffle?
Meat raffle! With optional Dr Seuss book! Two culture wars for the price of one!
Small-town bars in NZ do traditionally hold meat raffles on Friday nights. ‘Sorry I’m late dear, but I won 50 lbs of meat!
Remember when the SCOTUS ruled that the use of federal funds to entice states into Medicaid expansion was out of bounds? Scalia was offended by the unseemly coercion.
Maybe antivaxxers can all sign in to win a $10,000 burial policy.
They are using voter rolls, which may spur more dem leaning people to register.
But shouldn’t they have to request a ticket in this lottery? Is automatic lottery registration kosher with the GOP?
When I heard they some were paying people $100 to get vaccinated, my moral/ethical compass didn’t budge a micrometer.
I have zero problem with it.
The credit would go to the companies that employ vaccinated people.
Which is what I did 40 years ago. I beat the rush.
I suppose you do what you gotta do, and $1 million in federal funds has to be used one way or another to increase vaccinations.
But the fact that we have to pay people to do something that may save their lives is a telling commentary on the mental state of boobus americanus neandertalensis.
Really, it’s amazing the human species didn’t go extinct during the Pleistocene.
If only half the population is below average that’s OK.
But they’re very, very mean.
I have been saying they should do this for the national elections every two years, but with a real lottery prize - something in the neighborhood of $250 or 300 million (maybe tie it to the total number of eligible voters in the US?). I would guess people would crawl over broken glass to vote in an election where they could be set for life.
ETA: There are currently just under 5MM people in Ohio who have received at least one dose of vaccine. The probability of winning $1MM in the Powerball lottery is about 1/1.69 x 106, so the chances of winning on a Powerball ticket are actually almost 3x higher. Of course, the Powerball ticket is going to cost me $2.
The ethicists in the articles I cited seem to worry about 3 main issues with payments:
It sets the expectation that all such pro-social acts will be compensated (slippery slope/moral hazard) ;
It suggests that authorities need to resort to bribing the unvaccinated because these are more suspicious than other vaccines (backfire effect) ;
It unduly influences those who are in perilous financial straits because of the pandemic (coercion).
I saw no ends-means complications either, but I take seriously those who are trained to think deeply about medical ethics.
Slippery-slope arguments are a well-known logical fallacy. I’ll concede the possibility of a slippery slope here, but I’m not persuaded.
The backfire effect is a real concern here. We already have a huge societal problem with anti-vaxxers, and paying people to take the vaccine could exacerbate the problem.
The “undue-influence” problem is a stock IRB argument. They use it all the time to argue that subjects should not be compensated for risks in study: they should only be compensated for their time.
In this case, the argument ignores the fact that vaccine reluctance is concentrated among low-information groups, and there is a fairly strong positive correlation between income and knowledge of the actual risks. For someone who takes the viewpoint that getting people vaccinated is a universal good, this is actually an argument in favor of paying people to get vaccinated.
ETA: At least with regard POC groups who are understandably reluctant to trust our medical research system (see, e.g. the Tuskegee syphilis study to understand why) MSNBC did a huge service last night. The lead scientist at NIH who developed Coronavirus mRNA vaccines (it ended up as the Moderna vaccine) is a Black woman. She spoke pretty eloquently last night on O’Donnell’s show about vaccines.
I got nothing for dealing with Trumpers and generic anti-vaxxers.