Ohio’s 53% vaccination surge tied to $1M lottery; NY and Md. announce lotteries | Hacker News Reader

Ohio’s 53% vaccination surge tied to $1M lottery; NY and Md. announce lotteries

arstechnica.com

12 pointssatya7110 comments

I'm surprised I don't hear more pushback from the people who were willing to get vaccinated for free.

I'm all for it. Ohio vaccinated an extra 40,000 plague rats for $1 million. (They probably could have gotten the same result by offering them the 25 bucks apiece, but then you'd have to separate those ~40k from the ~75k who would have gotten the vaccine anyway.) Maybe we'll drag the country across the herd immunity line, kicking and screaming.

I'm sure we'll get extra kicking and screaming from those who didn't have to be dragged, too. Being loudly and persistently stupid can pay off.

Plague rats? Really? Is this how we want to talk about one another?

In Ohio at least, you can win if you've been vaccinated. It's not only open to people who haven't been vaccinated yet.

They should have a time bonus as well, so if you signed up for your appointment 10 weeks ago, you get a bonus of say 10 x $1000, that would get people really rushing to sign up.

(And not a bonus dependent of when your first shot was, because then we'd have a surge of people showing up at vaccination sites tomorrow without appoinments...).

In all seriousness, this proves a good point: it's easier to work with people (e.g. lotteries) than against (e.g. shaming to get the vaccine), even stupid selfish people you might not like.

I can see this being a contentious choice, but government agencies worldwide have been trying and openly talking about public health "nudge" methods for a long time now with varying degrees of success.

If it works, it works.

It's a great example of the saying "if an idea is stupid but it works, then it isn't stupid". When I heard about them, I thought these incentives were kinda goofy. I'm pleasantly surprised by how many people who hesitated to get their vaccines just needed a little nudge (as opposed to being hardcore antivaxxers that I assume will never get it willingly)

Money seems to be more valuable to people than something that might kill them. I guess if death isn't staring you right in the face you become complacent.

Which is not surprising for the young and not obese, where their death threat is almost nil. It would be like worrying about getting hit by lightning. They are more likely to die in a car crash on the way to get the vaccine, than die from Covid.

Trump supporters love lotteries apparently

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