From cows to schooling: Incentives to get a jab

In the Thai pastoral district of Mae Chaem, people are being offered the chance to win a cow every week in a lottery aimed at boosting vaccination rates.

In Lancaster, California, a raffle is being held to encourage teenagers to get vaccinated. The major prize is a $10,000 scholarship (with second prize a $5000 scholarship).

Federal Labor is proposing people be paid $300 to get vaccinated.Credit: Steven Siewert

All are incentives that governments around the world are embracing as they race to get as many people as possible vaccinated against coronavirus.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese is now channelling the incentive argument, calling for the federal government to offer $300 to anyone who is fully vaccinated by December 1. It would include anyone already vaccinated with a price tag of an eye-watering $6 billion.

The government was quick to argue it was a load of nonsense.

“We’ve looked carefully at the types of and the evidence from those (the) government worked with shows that these types of cash incentives are not necessary, won’t change it and prove to be quite wasteful in terms of the overall scale of public expenditure,” Finance Minister Simon Birmingham said on Tuesday morning.

Brave words from a government that has long argued the merits of incentives via its personal income tax cuts or business assistance to its “no jab, no pay” policy for childhood vaccinations.

And even braver given the amount of research coming in from around the world, and locally, that shows if Australia is going vaccinate 80 per cent of the population over the age of 16 it is going to need incentives of some sort.

The biggest incentive for vaccinations, so far, have been the various lockdowns put in place by governments to deal with a local coronavirus outbreak. The number of people who lined up for a vaccine when Melbourne went into lockdown more than trebled overnight.

And that will work for a while. But then the hard slog begins.

Overseas, it is already obvious that once a country gets above 50-60 per cent partial vaccination rate there is a slowdown in the proportion of people racing out to get a jab.

Canada leads the world in terms of people with at least one jab at 71.6 per cent on August 1. On July 1, the one dose rate was 68.2 per cent.

Research by economists Marta Serra-Garcia and Nora Szech released in May showed a financial incentive worked to get people vaccinated, but noted the payment had to be sufficiently large to overcome hesitancy amongst people who already are wary of inoculations.

Non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Ron Litan, argued in August last year that payments worked and that “the incentive payments are likely to be more effective with lower income people and families than those with higher incomes”.

Litan could have been writing about people in south-west Sydney. Data on Tuesday showed the single dose rate across the south-west is the lowest in NSW at just over a 33 per cent.

Some people are backing “non-financial” incentives, such as access to events that would be closed off to the un-vaccinated.

But research by German analysts Philipp Sprengholz, Luca Henkel and Cornelia Betsch a month ago found these had little impact on boosting the share of people willing to get a jab.

They found a large financial payment was needed (around $5200) to get a significant increase in vaccination rates, noting that “monetary incentives could increase vaccination uptake
by a few percentage points”.

Research from the Melbourne Institute from early June showed 54 per cent of people who would get vaccinated but were prepared to wait said they would get vaccinated as soon as possible if there was a cash payment on offer.

If the stated aim of an 80 per cent double-dose is to be reached sooner rather than later, just hoping a few ads or another premier wading through an hour-long press conference is not going to cut it.