Ohio Lottery to Give 5 People $1M Each to Encourage Vaccination | Hacker News Reader

Ohio Lottery to Give 5 People $1M Each to Encourage Vaccination

nytimes.com

59 pointslaurex78 comments

This is likely one of the most cost effective methods for increasing vaccination rates. VAT receipt lotteries are becoming a common tool to help increase VAT compliance among merchants. Consumers ask the merchant for a receipt so that they can enter the lottery, thereby forcing the merchant to pay VAT. The allure of a big payoff can motivate people to change behavior.

I like it. People avoiding vaccines probably have an idea that the vaccine carries a risk that is "low probability, high cost". This is psychologically counterbalanced by the "low probability, high profit" of the lottery.

There’s also a high probability that you will feel kind of crappy for a day or so. Probably enough to discourage some people on the margin.

True, that happens to me every time I play the lottery.

Tangentially related, Krispy Kreme offers people a free donut for getting the vaccine, but then they say this in their promo page [0]:

> What if I don’t want to be vaccinated, can I still get this offer?

> We understand that choosing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine is a highly personal decision. We advise all employees and guests to consult with their healthcare provider regarding whether to obtain a COVID-19 vaccination and which vaccine to receive after reviewing the available information. If you have made the personal decision to not receive the COVID vaccine, please visit us on Mondays, 3/29/21 – 5/24/21, to receive a free Original Glazed® doughnut and a medium brewed coffee to get your week off to a good start.

Which seems to make the whole promotion kinda questionable and pointless? Although I guess people without the vaccine can only redeem once a week while people with the vaccine can redeem every single day... Probably not a healthy decision though. In any case, I suppose the campaign is a success since it's getting people to talk about them.

As for the lottery and other incentives mentioned in the article, I have a question: how should people with valid medical exceptions be handled in this kind of situation?

[0] https://www.krispykreme.com/promos/vaccineoffer

Burying that in the fine print though also means that non-vacinated people are less likely to find out that they can get a free donut, but the general public will think "shot = donut".

Imagine living in India right now and reading this headline.

America was founded on oppositional defiance. If the government is telling me to do something, I'm going to do the exact opposite to prove I can't be controlled!

I mean, if you squint just right, so was India.

Pretty much anywhere with a revolution or similar in their history.

Please do not take HN threads into flamewar. It's not what this site is for and not going to end well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, did you miss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27028363? If you'd please take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. I don't want to ban you!

I genuinely don't understand why my comment is so problematic, but I'll do my best to make only anodyne comments from now on.

I had this come up today in a Zoom conversation with a locked-down colleague in India. So embarrassing.

I feel like this will make those who are scared so much more suspicious. They’ll think “There’s no free lunch so why are you bribing me to get something? It must be really bad if you have to go this far”

Yeah, there are likely 3 categories of people currently waiting on the vaccine.

1. People who watched how chaotic it was to get a vaccine at first, and tuned out. They might not know how easy it is to get one now in most of the US, so some campaigning might be able to reach them.

2. People who want to "wait and see", who have concerns that there are longer term effects from the vaccines and want to wait to see if it's fine for other people they know. This might not necessarily just be people who are paranoid. Lots of folks with conditions that suppress their immune system are leery of the vaccine too, seeing how it's laid out some people with no immune system issues for days.

3. People who believe a wild conspiracy theory about getting microchipped, 5g, plannedemics, etc.

A lottery might get some of group #1 to check back in, but so would just better engagement. How much door to door canvassing would $5 million get?

It will have the exact opposite effect on groups 2 and 3, making them even more paranoid. If this is so great and doesn't have real drawbacks, why offer millions of dollars to get it?

I'm sort of a 4th category then. I've already had the virus twice. The first time I only lost sense of smell for a single day and had a very mild fever for three days, and the second time was only caught because I was lazy and didn't get good sleep the night before, so I called out "sick" from work, and they made me get tested before coming back and I tested positive while being asymptomatic. Had I not called out, wouldn't have known at all that I even had it a second time. Nobody else I came into contact with for days prior tested positive either, I do always wear a mask around others, and even while in my car while in a drive-thru.

Based on my experience of contracting the virus and being largely unaffected by it, I felt there was no urgent priority for me over others to receive the vaccine, since it's not beneficial to myself, so I waited until long after it became available to me before getting it, just self classifying as "lowest priority".

I understand the concept "getting vaccinated protects others" but at the time I contracted it a second time, the vaccine was not available to me, so having just had it for a second time, it was significantly less likely for me to contract a third time within the following few months. I did just get vaccinated on Monday with the Janssen one and so far have had no side effects at all from it.

Free donuts, now free lottery tickets. Aren’t we past the point of diminishing returns where treating people like stupid fat cattle isn’t going to move the needle any further?

Why would we be past that point?

This result of this will be the litmus test to whether we are past that point or not.

I think you're underestimating how desperate of a situation some people are in. Offering people money during a historic economic downturn is likely quite effective. It's also completely unethical. Add this to the list of things done in the name of "public health" in the past year that will be seen as barbaric by future generations.

A stupid waste of money, perhaps, but if we look to the mass vaccination campaigns of the past, even to the earliest ones, they all turned out to be pretty good ideas.

It's economic coercion. Frankly, public health officials and the pharmaceutical industry do not deserve our trust about these vaccines. People would be much more confident about taking them under different circumstances. I'll continue to take a wait and see approach. It appears likely the majority of the rest of the country will as well, if current decreased vaccination rates hold steady.

What is more coercive? The taxpayers subsidizing your ER hospital stay or the state offering an incentive for something that you're free to reject.

The only people subsidizing my ER visits are myself and my employer. I'm in my early 30's, in good health, with no comorbidities. The chances I end up in the ER for covid are about as likely as ending up there for a blood clot in my brain.

This is my point: people are capable of making a cost/benefit analysis decision on their own. If you want to give them money, just give them money. Don't coerce them into making a healthcare decision that might not be right for them.

I was using the generic form of "you". A good fraction of people who end up in the ER are subsidized by the taxpayers. How is offering someone an incentive to avoid this situation coercion? If you have a well-paying job with good health insurance, you are unlikely to be a burden to the taxpayers and should not feel "coerced" by this lottery.

Look at it from the perspective of a line cook. The government ends your ability to make a living by enacting unscientific and capricious restrictions around indoor dining. You're now out of work.

All you need to do to secure a paycheck is take a couple injections of a drug that is not FDA approved for general use. If anything at all happens to you there's no one to sue because the manufacturers and health care providers have legal immunity.

You've been working odd jobs, gig work, etc to try to make ends meet so you've contracted covid a time or two. You know you're immune; or at the very least, not at much risk. But you have a child support payment, and another son living with you. What's the worst thing that could happen taking the shot?

It turns out the tail risk is quite high. But like a commenter said above: it's like the reverse lottery. High tail risk, but low risk overall and an immediate reward.

Maybe "coercion" is a little hyperbolic. I'll retreat to my earlier characterization of "unethical".

Removing the liability shield on these corporations who have a history of acting in their best interest and not the public would be the best thing they could do to improve vaccine adoption.

Bingo.

Can't even give money away nowadays.

What's barbaric is the attitude of folks who require an incentive like this to do the right thing and get vaccinated.

I disagree that getting vaccinated is the right choice for everyone but I agree that doing it for the money is absolutely the wrong reason.

In my opinion: Not even slightly. I have to make the assumption you've not seen either great desperation nor great stupidity.

From government prospective, it is probably cheaper than unemployment, continue the lock down and more stimulus checks

Curious if it will triggers different kind of "Cobra Effect" -

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-cobra-effect-a-new-frea...

    MEHROTRA: So the “cobra effect” refers to a scheme in colonial India where the British governor, or whoever, the person in charge in Delhi, wanted to rid Delhi of cobras. Apparently in his opinion there were too many cobras in Delhi. So he had the bounty placed on cobras. And he expected this would solve the problem. But the population in Delhi, at least some of it, responded by farming cobras. And all of a sudden the administration was getting too many cobra skins. And they decided the scheme wasn’t as smart as initially it appeared and they rescinded the scheme. But by then the cobra farmers had this little population of cobras to deal with. And what do you do if there’s no market? You just release them. And so this significantly, by a few orders of magnitude, worsened the cobra menace in Delhi.

Humans have not evolved beyond incentives.

Do you also think we are past the point where treating people like pathologically gullible buffoons by peddling wild and easily debunkable conspiracy theories in order to get votes could succeed on a national scale?

Oh, you mean like Hunter's laptop?

I don't think so, especially not in Ohio - a lot of folks (rural especially based on my social feeds) are not planning on getting vaccinated, but I think this actually has a chance of getting them to do it.

I wish more states would do this and I also wish it was more troublesome to remain un-vaccinated (no air travel, no university attendance, no stadium or movie theater admissions). We should use both the carrot and the stick to get everyone vaccinated.

I'm confident this will be effective in the short run, but I'm certain the human interest story about one deserving lottery recipient will be more good vaccine publicity in a few months.

They should do this to encourage weight loss.

I think it's worth a try.

Getting vaccination rates up will save lives and boost the economy as lower infection/hospitalization/death rates help people feel confident engaging in normal economic activities.

If it works, other states can do it too. If not, well, at least it wasn't a very big pile of money.

Bring on both the carrot and the stick! There should just be a tax on the privilege of choosing not to be vaccinated. Something like a 3% tax on the AGI for individuals who are eligible to be vaccinated but are not. Now use that to pay for the lottery.

The US should start exporting vaccines and this news should be made very public. Not only is this a good thing to do, but it will help drive higher vaccination rates if people feel that they're about to lose access to a scarce resource.

People like to panic when there's mindset scarcity. Right now people think...vaccines everywhere, here to stay. But if you see how people reacted to toilet paper, and not recently gasoline...I bet if Biden says "These vaccines expire and we're going to export them by July 4th and slowly reduce our stockpile" I bet you people start lining up again.

Right now there's no "end date". Give people an end date.

People who are averse to vaccines will just see this as a bribe.

Isn't it?

A bribe implies that what you're wanting someone to do is illegal or bad. Their logic is that if the vaccine is so necessary or safe, you wouldn't need to bribe people to take it.

I see it more as an incentive, like being able to write off private donations at tax time.

Ha. I would think this would work a lot better to give 500 people $10K each. Not life-changing money individually, but it will serve to get a lot more people moving.

Proportionally more people buy lottery tickets when the jackpot is bigger, so in terms of driving vaccine adoption there's a good argument for concentrating the reward as much as possible.

I think this is a good idea, but $5,000 to 1,000 people would probably be even better.

If your incentive is distribution of the money, potentially yes. But like a real lottery I think this is about taking advantage of people's low statistical knowledge banking on hitting it big. I quite like it

It's a good, hilariously ironic, and slightly sad idea. People are afraid of taking a vaccine because they don't understand the statistically minuscule possibility of serious side-effects? Give them a statistically minuscule positive incentive to balance it out!

The people who really distrust the vaccine will just think, "Gee, the same government that manipulated everyone into thinking they were all going to die is now manipulating them into thinking they'll win the lottery." This won't convince them, but it might appeal to the sense of greed of the ones who are just lazy and don't like mild side-effects.

Those folks are unreachable anyway.

I agree. Maybe take it even further and just give $1k outright to everyone who gets vaccinated (or has already been vaccinated). It would even double as an economic stimulus and hardly cost more than previous stimulus rounds.

The country has already suffered enormous financial loss thanks to investments in tracking, emergency medical support, vaccine development and distribution, and economic stimulus. That's on top of the massive economic damage suffered by lockdown, stay-home campaigns, and ongoing restrictions. A $1k payout per citizen for getting vaccinated would be a drop in the bucket by comparison - especially if it means finishing off the pandemic.

EDIT: Is anyone downvoting willing to explain why? I'm genuinely curious.

Best idea so far. Make a calculation how much they would cost to take care of in case they got Covid, give 80% of that directly to them if they get vaccinated. It's almost like investing in your own people.

That wouldn't work, as the vast majority of people cost $0 to care for if they get COVID.

In the short term, perhaps, in the long term it's looking not so rosy, even for the apparently asymptomatic.

quarantine is definitely more expensive than $0, unless their time is worthless

Oh no, our multi-million dollar ad campaigns funded by taxpayers didn't hit the mark? Let's keep throwing millions and millions of their dollars into the fire until they do what we want!

Depending on the outcome this may be the best $5M spent by government this year. If enough people are motivated by the jackpot a lot more than this could be saved from hospitalizations prevented alone

Imagine if we incentivized eating healthy and exercising...

This money represents 0.0001667% of the federal COVID response.

Proportionally, it's about the equivalent wastefulness of a FAANG engineer losing a quarter under a couch cushion.

There's many ways to incentivizes people...This is just one of many.

We had to lock down because of a shortage of hospital capacity. Instead of spending money to improve that in some meaningful way, we're just throwing it away. Thanks, government.

Increasing hospital capacity costs a hell of a lot more than $5M.

You think $5M will make a significant dent with regards to hospital capacity? It seems too small an amount for that end

I also don't think this is about hospital capacity but about inching the state closer to herd immunity (assuming this is possible for COVID); to me it seems a smart investment but I suppose time will tell

This is just one state. Count up all the money that's been spent on other 'awareness' propaganda, we could have built dozens of hospitals and provided scholarships for 100's of students.

Do you realize the irony in your comment? You are saying we should be building more hospital capacity instead of incentivizing people to get vaccinated. If people don't get vaccinated we will definitely be needing that capacity!

We're not locked down due to lack of vaccine, we're locked down due to hospital capacity.

If everybody had the vaccine we would not be worried about hospital capacity

Edit: Also what do you mean by locked down? Very few places are actually locked down. Where are you referring to?

They're spending it to increase vaccine uptake, which directly contributes to lower utilization of available hospital capacity.

Would you have rather waited until hospital capacity was overwhelmed? Spikes in hospitalizations follow - like clockwork - spikes in contagion. By the time hospitals were overrun, that'd mean you'd be looking at another two or three weeks of ever-growing number of people who'd need to be hospitalized in a system that is already at capacity.

No amount of money will change what happened in the past. The #1 problem we face today is vaccine hesitancy.

> We had to lock down because of a shortage of hospital capacity

If we alleviated that bottleneck another would pop up at the crematorium.

Actually DeWine spent plenty preparing for the worst case scenario, including setting up overflow hospital beds for covid patients at the convention center in the capital city.

As an Ohioan, I'm glad the federal money is going to the people. The lottery is a little silly, but at least its not going to another bloated government run union

Lottery is probably the best way to incentivize poor people.

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