Incentives for vaccination don’t work.
Josie Fischels 21 { Josie Fischels is a Digital News Producer at Iowa Public Radio. She is a 2022 graduate of the University of Iowa's school of journalism, where she also majored in theater arts (and, arguably, minored in the student newspaper, The Daily Iowan).} - ("Get $100 For A Vaccine? Cash Incentives Work For Some, Others Not So Much," NPR, published 7-30-2021, accessed 7-13-2023, https://www.npr.org/2021/07/30/1022567245/vaccine-cash-incentives-100-dollars-lotteries-effectiveness)//marlborough-km/
But in states such as Arkansas, vaccination rates remain low despite incentive programs. And while incentives in other states have had better luck, their success has been short-lived in many cases, including Ohio's. In an interview with NPR's Ari Shapiro on All Things Considered, behavioral economist and University of Pennsylvania professor Katy Milkman said that cash incentives tend to work on groups within the population known as "the movable middle" — people who are on the fence about getting a vaccine, but not totally opposed.∂ "If someone is adamantly opposed to vaccination, they have a strong reason that they would never get a vaccine, paying them $100 is very unlikely to change their minds," she said.∂ So what targets all groups? Marketing. Experts like Stanford professor of medicine and economics Kevin Schulman have argued that the money states have used to incentivize people to get a vaccine could have been better spent promoting vaccines themselves to groups unwilling to get them.∂ "I would go back to those lottery states and ask how much did you spend on the lottery and how much could you have spent on Facebook ads that could appeal to those populations?" Schulman said.