During the next pandemic, let’s pay people to get vaccinated

this is true It is generally accepted that people love money. If you show them money, they are generally more likely to do what you want, be it stop smoking, exerciseor follow their medicines.

When vaccines began to be released from laboratories during the pandemic, governments began to wonder: How can we encourage as many people as possible to get vaccinated against Covid-19? Countries have tried a hodgepodge of approaches: they’ve rolled out strict public health messages, engaged with hard-to-reach communities, got celebrities hooked up on vaccines, and made them mandatory.

But politicians and scientists also offered another controversial approach – why not just offer people cold cash? This again sparked a heated discussion.

Those on the utilitarian side to tell that if more people were vaccinated, the public benefit would outweigh all other harms. But there is no guarantee that offering people money for a good deed will convince them to do it—it may even suggest the opposite, that otherwise the deed is not worth doing. AND 2000 study A study done with Israeli high school students found that when they were paid a small commission to raise money for charity on a given day, the group that received the commission actually collected less than the group that was paid nothing. I urge you to do good.

A big concern is that cash incentive programs may have unforeseen long-term consequences. Offering people money for a public good can reduce their desire to do the same for free in the future. It can also cause mistrust. Unlike blood donation or other public health activities, vaccines are divisive. And Researches show that in paid clinical trials, people associate higher fees with greater risk. Paying people to get vaccinated – where it used to be free – can make them overestimate the risks involved.

Finally, ethics are nebulous. Ethicists argue that a monetary reward does not mean the same for a needy single parent who lost his job during a pandemic as it does for a normally working middle class. The offer of money can be seen as a form of coercion or exploitation, since the single parent cannot reasonably refuse it. “A gun in the back works, but is it worth using it?” says Nancy Jacker, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

But in a new article published In the magazine Natureresearchers Florian Schneider, Paul Campos-Mercade, Armando Meyer and others have addressed these concerns.

In 2021, Meyer and colleagues conducted a randomized trial to see if financial incentives increase vaccine use. In his study, published In the magazine The science in October 2021, Meyer and his co-authors recruited more than 8,000 people in Sweden and offered some of them $24 for vaccinations over the next 30 days, while others were offered nothing. The researchers found that the monetary incentive increased the proportion of people who got vaccinated by about 4 percent. This number did not change significantly based on age, race, ethnicity, education, or income. Other studies during the pandemic have also shown that financial incentives have been effective.