7/24/21 How Do You Reach the Unvaccinated?

We liberals find it easy to believe that a "tribal right-wing identity" -- as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat puts it -- is what keeps people from getting COVID shots. It's true that the most successful vaccine initiatives are among Democrats, the elderly and educated liberals.

But neither Trump nor Fox News can account for the almost 80 million Americans who remain unvaccinated. The situation is much more nuanced than that.

"It's also an education divide, an age divide, a gender divide, a racial divide, an urban-rural divide, an insured-uninsured divide and more," Douthat says.

An ongoing Kaiser Family Health (KFF) poll (linked below), says that 23 percent of Republicans say they definitely won’t get the vaccine, as do 22 percent of white evangelicals. That's the hard right. But 58 percent of white evangelicals have had their two jabs, while Black adults show a 60 percent vaccination rate, Hispanic people a 63 percent rate. Those two groups are hardly likely to go in for Donald Trump, (although there are right-leaning Hispanics and even, yes, Trump fans).

Douthat thinks paying vaccine skeptics is the answer -- $1000 for a two-shot course of vaccinations. "I don’t see how imposing lockdowns and long-term school closures, with all their disproportionate negative effects on lower-income workers and parents, can pass an ethical test but paying people to get vaccinated does not."

West Virginia offered $100 savings bonds as incentives. In Houston, Harris county executive Lina Hidalgo unveiled a raffle-slash-scholarship program to encourage young people to get vaccinated: Winners get $5,000 for college costs for being fully vaccinated. There are also raffles for tickets to Houston Texans games, the Houston Rodeo grounds, Monster Jam, Disney on Ice, and more. So far, it seems, corporations that require vaccinations do push the rate higher. Incentivizing Americans is a tough task.

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Should there be $1000 incentive payments, or would that cause waiting behavior in the future -- for example, if the U.S. health advisors want people to get booster shots? What's your idea for boosting the percentage of vaccinations among minorities or dismissive young people? Bobbleheads? Stuffed animals? Gift cards? How would you reduce hesitancy based on fear? The FDA only authorized the vaccinations on an emergency basis, after all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/opinion/covid-vaccine-hesitancy.html

https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-june-2021/