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

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https://www.wired.com/story/lets-pay-peo...accinated/

EXCERPTS: . . . But policymakers and academics also suggested another, controversial approach—why not just offer people cold, hard cash? This reignited a thorny debate. 

Those on the utilitarian side say that if more people get vaccinated, the public benefit outweighs all other harms. But there’s no guarantee that offering people money to do a good deed convinces them to do it—it might even suggest the opposite, that the action isn’t worth doing otherwise...

[...] A big worry is that cash incentive programs might have unintended long-term consequences. Offering people money to do a public good deed might reduce their willingness to do the same thing for free in the future. It could also trigger distrust. Unlike blood donation or other public health interventions, vaccines are divisive. And research has shown that in paid clinical trials, people associate higher payments with greater risk. Paying people to get vaccinated—when it’s previously been done for free—might make them overestimate the risks involved.

Finally, the ethics are nebulous. Ethicists argue that a monetary reward does not mean the same thing to a cash-strapped single parent who lost their job during the pandemic as it does to a comfortably employed middle-class person. Offering the money could be seen as a form of coercion or exploitation, as the single parent can’t reasonably decline it...

[...] But in a new paper published in the journal Nature, researchers Florian Schneider, Pol Campos-Mercade, Armando Meier, and others addressed these concerns. [...] To bolster their findings, they complemented their Swedish study with another randomized trial in the United States...

[...] While the findings support the idea of paying people to get vaccinated when the next pandemic inevitably rolls around, the results can’t be applied globally. Ana Santos Rutschman, a professor of law at Villanova University in the US who is an expert in vaccine law and policy, is skeptical about whether findings truly apply the same way in the US as they do in Sweden.

[...] But he acknowledges that the paper can’t necessarily predict what will happen in other countries. It could be a different story in a country where, say, trust in the government is especially poor, or in lower-income countries. But that wasn’t the aim of the study. “Our goal was to have a paper that offers some tools for testing for unintended consequences and is an example for how one can do this.”

[...] Meier also acknowledges that the team’s data doesn’t fully close the ethical debate that surrounds paid vaccine incentives... (MORE - missing details)
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