Calls for $10m in prizes to motivate Australians to get vaccinated

A prize pool of $10m would be handed out to vaccinated Australians under a radical proposal to try to fix the slow Covid-19 jab rollout.

A radical idea involving a $10m lottery has been proposed to try to fix Australia’s slow Covid-19 vaccine rollout.

Under the plan, proposed by Grattan Institute health program director Stephen Duckett, every Australian vaccinated would be eligible to win 10 weekly prizes valued at $1m each.

“People should be rewarded for being vaccinated and it encourages them to speed up their vaccination appointments,” Dr Duckett told 3AW.

“One million dollars is a lot of money and it would really reward us all. You don’t have to do anything except what you should be doing anyway – getting vaccinated.

Victoria's chief health officer Brett Sutton receives his second AstraZeneca vaccine. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw – POOL via NCA NewsWire

“We just really need to get some excitement into it, to actually tug at our heartstrings and say you need to be stepping up.

“We want something really big to capture everyone’s attention.”

Dr Duckett said the weekly $1m lottery couldn’t start until November when everybody had had a chance to be vaccinated.

But he said once you were in the draw, you would be eligible for all of the 10 prizes.

“We can’t unleash demand when you don’t have enough supply,” Dr Duckett said.

People line up at Sydney's mass vaccination hub in Sydney Olympic Park as Australia's vaccine rollout is bolstered with more Pfizer vaccine arriving into the country.

“By October, we should have plenty of supply so that everybody who wants a vaccine should be able to get a vaccine.

“We really need to be speeding up the vaccination, (but) we can’t do it until we’ve got the doses.”

Just 16.29 per cent of Australians aged 16 and older are fully vaccinated with both doses, with 38 per cent having received their first dose.

The nation’s vaccine supply is expected to ramp up over the next three months, with three million Pfizer doses being brought forward from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the third and the arrival of the Moderna vaccine from September.

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