Countries Are Using Money and Beer to Incentivise Covid Vaccination

2 min read

In light of the persistent vaccine hesitancy among some people, governments around the world are considering a range of incentives to induce people go get jabbed (beyond, that is, preventing the unvaccinated from living a normal life).

An Australian pub has received backing from Prime Minister Scott Morrison to give vaccinated punters free pints, despite the Therapeutic Goods Administration previously turning these plans down due to rules about offering alcohol as an incentive to receive medicines. “It’s a sensible rule,” said Morrison. “But in these circumstances, the national interest is to get vaccinated.”

Free beer has also been suggested as an incentive for vaccination in America, where President Joe Biden said last month: “That’s right, get a shot, have a beer. Free beer for everyone 21 years or over to celebrate the independence from the virus.”

This, however, is all child’s play compared to the latest scheme being considered in Germany. Some of the country’s economists have urged the Government to give those who are unsure about being vaccinated €300 (£258) cash if they get ‘jabbed’! The Times has the story.

Officials say the effort is beginning to flag in many parts of the country because of falling demand. This has led to concerns that Germany could struggle to reach herd immunity, which is estimated to require vaccinating about 80% of people. That number is disputed and has risen with the dawn of more transmissible strains.

The scale of the problem was highlighted yesterday by a poll published in Die Welt, which found that 12% of Germans had no intention of being immunised and 18% had yet to make an appointment.

Opinions differ on how to win them around. Some politicians have suggested offering cinema, museum or swimming pool tickets, or setting up drop-in vaccination stands in football stadiums and shopping centres. The Health Ministry has held out the prospect of abolishing swathes of pandemic restrictions once enough people have been jabbed.

However, a number of economists have proposed a much more straightforward incentive: hard cash. “With a cash reward, people can immediately see the positive impact on their finances and are free to use the money according to their own preferences,” Jan Schnellenbach, Professor of Economics at the Brandenburg University of Technology, said. …

Nora Szech, an Economist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, has calculated that a €500 bonus would raise the proportion of the population willing to be vaccinated to 90%.

Schnellenbach believes that €200 or €300 would be enough. “There are pointers in the academic literature, from laboratory and field experiments, that show you can achieve really quite big effects on people’s behaviour with this kind of sum,” he said.

Worth reading in full.

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126 Comments
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hurleyp
hurleyp
5 years ago

Are these “incentives” available to those who were previously jabbed?

Epi
Epi
5 years ago

Have these people never read or heard of Dr Faustus?

AethelredTheReadier
AethelredTheReadier
5 years ago

Bread and circuses…has anything actually changed since Roman times? I think they must take us all for idiots. Mind you…

albert hall
albert hall
5 years ago

Bournemouth council are offering free taxi service to your place of inoculation

AethelredTheReadier
AethelredTheReadier
5 years ago
Reply to  albert hall

I wonder if the ambulance ride to hospital afterwards is free too?

Greyjaybee
Greyjaybee
5 years ago

Cant people see it yet, that if a medical procedure requires coercion to participate in, it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The psyop continues……

SteveMol
SteveMol
5 years ago

That German idea will probably be counter productive – people may hold off until the reward increases. And when it comes to those awaiting the second jab or ultimately the first, second or umpteenth ‘booster’, they’re likely to hold off for a similar incentive.

DanClarke
DanClarke
5 years ago

Propaganda is a well used tool

enlighteneduk
enlighteneduk
5 years ago

People will do anything for free beer, yet will do little for freedom.

Epi
Epi
5 years ago
Reply to  enlighteneduk

Free beer is easy Freedom you need to fight for, as we’re finding out.

SweetBabyCheeses
SweetBabyCheeses
5 years ago

I think it’s clear that this government hasn’t been consulting with enough economists let alone too many. I can’t believe that any proper behavioural economist would suggest that influencing people is this easy. One could say that reason economics even exists as a discipline is because humans are illiogical and fickle creatures who do not obey market rules.

Hasn’t the cabinet read Freakonomics?!

Take one famous chapter, a nursery is sick of parents turning up late to collect their kids and isn’t having much success in applying guilt as a social pressure to do so on time. So they introduce a fine. Weirdly, they then find that the lateness problem gets worse! The explanation was that parents were actually happier to pay the fine as it was a nominal amount – which crucially then alleviated them of all of their guilt and took away any further incentive to be punctual.

If people don’t want the “vaccine” for health reasons, then you can’t persuade them it’s safe by offering them money!!! This is going to make people even more sceptical about it, and rightly so! The higher the sums of money, the bigger the perceived risk they’re being asked to take… Read more »

PhilButton
PhilButton
5 years ago

A pub in Biggleswade is offering a free pint to anyone having their first jab

DanClarke
DanClarke
5 years ago
Reply to  PhilButton

Who is paying for that, is government propaganda cash reaching that far????

SteveMol
SteveMol
5 years ago
Reply to  PhilButton

I’d be interested to know how they verify the ‘claim’

imp66
imp66
5 years ago

How malleable, gullible and thick do THEY think we are? Oh, hang on a sec…

tom171uk
tom171uk
5 years ago

This is profoundly immoral.

PissedOffDad
PissedOffDad
5 years ago

£300 will just about cover the cost of a couple of the PCR tests that you’ll still no doubt need to do for your day trips to Boulogne or Calais or wherever. They give with one hand and take with the other. It’s a truly cynical manoeuvre. Up there with the worst kind of marketing, aimed at the desperate and the foolish. Wouldn’t surprise me if they notched it up another level with some reality TV setting to promote vaccination, something like Jab Island or The Great British Jab Off. Off the scale fuck-wittery, truly.

SteveMol
SteveMol
5 years ago
Reply to  PissedOffDad

“The Great British Jab Off”. Is that a misspelled euphemism?

Epi
Epi
5 years ago
Reply to  SteveMol

Love it! 😂😂😂

Epi
Epi
5 years ago
Reply to  PissedOffDad

15 months ago I would have recommended you for the nut farm now sadly yes I think your suggestions are probably in the mix somewhere. Extraordinary and frightening in equal measure.

Drew63
Drew63
5 years ago

With all due respect to my anti-tax friends: You do maintain the right to say “No thanks”.

A financial (or other) incentive to get vaccinated? Please explain to me where the harm comes in?

I’d certainly keep in mind the point at which the risk from the vaccine (very low) exceeds the risk from the virus (also very low) amongst very young people.

The science on the effectiveness of most of the vaccines is pretty clear. They aren’t perfect, to be sure, but they do seem to have a scientifically proven level of efficacy against serious covid infection. None of which is true regarding masks, lockdowns, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions as a means of controlling covid-19.

Vaccines are proven to be effective (not 100%, not without risk, etc.) All the other bullshit, the bullshit we are fighting against, is totally unsupported by science.

Choose which battles are worth fighting.

RW
RW
5 years ago
Reply to  Drew63

The «harm» comes from paying lip service to the principle of consent for medical procedures while acting with open contempt towards it: Either vaccination of as much of the population as possible is overridingly important. Then, the goverment must make it mandatory, as it would otherwise carelessly risk people’s lives.

Or it’s not. Then, it should be up to the individual to chose without government coercion hidden below a few layers of paint.

Julian
Julian
5 years ago
Reply to  RW

Exactly this.

Other harms:
1) People not told it’s still in trials and that long term safety data that would normally be assessed has not been gathered yet
2) Emergency authorisation is fraudulent on two levels: firstly there is no emergency, secondly there are other treatments which have been hidden from us which would invalidate the authorisation
3) Coercion (no jab no job, travel restrictions, threats of vaccine passports)
4) Falsely claiming you get jabbed to help others when the evidence for this is scant
5) Used on the very vulnerable on whom it had not been tested, results questionable to say the least
6) Clear that testing was skimped otherwise the issues with clotting and the circulation of the spike proteins would have been spotted in trials
7) Mass vaccination of the non-vulnerable in a pandemic has never been recommended or tried before
8) Part of the overall mad response – portrayed as the only way to get out of lockdowns. Once they did that, they had to come up with a vaccine, however useless or dangerous. It must be questioned.
9) People not told it’s experimental
10) Boosters chasing variants, forever. Are we going to and vaccinate every… Read more »

William Gruff
William Gruff
5 years ago
Reply to  RW

‘Either vaccination of as much of the population as possible is overridingly important. Then, the goverment (sic) must make it mandatory, as it would otherwise carelessly risk people’s lives.’

How can an unvaccinated person pose a threat to the vaccinated?

Epi
Epi
5 years ago
Reply to  William Gruff

Hasn’t Shapps just admitted the experimental gene therapy treatment is pointless here or am I missing something? It is therefore not only dangerous but useless into the bargain.

Well worth a free pint then! NOT!!!

692CABB9-7B49-4EF7-8569-17815AE1B422.jpeg
Steve-Devon
Steve-Devon
5 years ago
Reply to  Drew63

It infantilises and trivialises a major medical intervention. In the UK, older people who one may consider most vulnerable, have been keen to take up the vaccine as they felt, with some justification, that they were at risk. So we can see that for people for whom the vaccine makes some sense, there was no need for an incentive, they could work it out for themselves. The question now has to be why are the powers that be so keen to get people who are not at risk to buy in to this experimental treatment?

Julian
Julian
5 years ago
Reply to  Steve-Devon

That is indeed a very good question. I had thought the govt would declare victory once the vulnerable had been vaccinated.

There are only 2 possible answers that occur to me
1) They are so wrapped up in coronamadness that they are just forging ahead on autopilot, still thinking they are doing good works
2) They know it’s over and have done for some time, but didn’t think they could sell this to the public, having opened the Pandora’s Box of fear.
3) There are more sinister forces at work here – at the very least politicians in the UK loving the easy power.

Answer (1) is possible – I suspect some politicians do believe their own publicity – but seems like a stretch. I just don’t think they are that stupid.
Answer (2) on the face of it seems plausible and is presumably TY’s preferred interpretation. But the govt has done very little to bring the population to their senses. Quite the opposite. Without admitting their mistakes, the could have dialled down the fear. They chose not to.
That leaves Answer (3) – some flavour of wickedness.

William Gruff
William Gruff
5 years ago
Reply to  Julian

Of your two possible answers I think number three is the most likely.

PissedOffDad
PissedOffDad
5 years ago
Reply to  Drew63

“Choose which battles are worth fighting”

I like how you sign off your grade E GCSE thesis with that quintessential Sun Tzu-like quote. Makes you look deep as opposed to the shallow bottom-feeder you no doubt are. Clever!

William Gruff
William Gruff
5 years ago
Reply to  Drew63

The risk from the virus is very much lower for every age group than the risk from the ‘vaccine‘.

SteveMol
SteveMol
5 years ago
Reply to  Drew63

77th Brigade changing tack? The risk from the vaccine moves from “unmentionable” to “very low”

SteveMol
SteveMol
5 years ago
Reply to  Drew63

“[The vaccines] aren’t perfect, to be sure, but they do seem to have a scientifically proven level of efficacy against serious covid infection.”
No they don’t – scientists can’t *prove* that the vaccinated people who subsequently contracted covid would have acquired a heavier dose had they not been vaccinated. And similarly, scientists can’t *prove* that unvaccinated people who were hospitalised or died from covid, wouldn’t have been hospitalised or died if they’d been vaccinated. The logic in all this seems to be that I should wear a motorcycle safety helmet all the time, just in case I get on a motorcycle, in which case the helmet might save my life if I fall off

PissedOffDad
PissedOffDad
5 years ago

Why not promise 72 virgins in Paradise. Allahu akbar Astrazeneca!!

Annie
Annie
5 years ago
Reply to  PissedOffDad

72 fully vaccinated virgins.

SteveMol
SteveMol
5 years ago
Reply to  Annie

Is Hangcock the little prick you’re talking about?

JayBee
JayBee
5 years ago

If I was just hesitant and not imformed and adamantly opposed anyway, nothing could make me even more suspicious and hesitant than such incentivization.
The well known applicable German saying where I come from is:
“Watt nix kost, datt iss och nix.”

David101
David101
5 years ago

This beggars belief. If it really is in the interest of a nation’s long-term health to vaccinate its entire population indiscriminately, and if the government really are SO sure of themselves (which they appear to be), then surely the information exists that proves this to be so.
Very little of this information has been forthcoming, only propaganda messaging such as “get vaccinated and save lives” and so forth has reached the level of the public thus far. Wouldn’t an open, honest informational campaign be far cheaper than monetary or other bribes?
The fact is they simply CANNOT provide those facts yet, for they are yet to be established.
I can just imagine a conversation with a previously vaccine-hesitant Aussie:
“So, what made you change your mind given yesterday you were so unsure?”
“You know, for me it was the beer, mate!”

Cecil B
Cecil B
5 years ago

When I was ten years of age my father called me into his study

He had a very serious look on his face as he sat me down

He said ‘Son if anyone ever offers you a free beer in return for taking a vaccine don’t do it’

That was 53 years ago. I have followed that advice all my life, now is not the time to change

Paul B
Paul B
5 years ago

I suppose one ‘amount’ I’d consider is removing the indemnity from big pharma for all recipients

CynicalRealist
CynicalRealist
5 years ago
Reply to  Paul B

And make their senior executives personally liabile too.

stewart
stewart
5 years ago

This has led to concerns that Germany could struggle to reach herd immunity, which is estimated to require vaccinating about 80% of people. That number is disputed and has risen with the dawn of more transmissible strains.

So you need 80% to have herd immunity, but if a variant that renders the vaccine ineffective appears, then you may need more than 80% of the people to take the same vaccine that the variant now eludes. That’s science.

The papers don’t even need to worry about displaying jumbled reasoning to build the case for plugging every man, woman and child with their wretched vaccine. The stupid, bovine masses won’t pick any of it up.

The holdouts probably mostly do. That’s why they are holdouts. They can spot the bullshit.

But can they stand the pressure?

TheyLiveAndWeLockdown
TheyLiveAndWeLockdown
5 years ago
Reply to  stewart

And how did the virus evade the jabs?

MSM. It’s the unvaccinated!

SteveMol
SteveMol
5 years ago

Yes, this nasty variant, giving itself to the unvaccinated but *not* killing them, just so that they’ll go out and infect the vaccinated who it *will* kill.
Nasty, nasty variant!
Just as a matter of interest, what happens when we reach 100% vaccination and still haven’t achieved herd immunity?

JayBee
JayBee
5 years ago
Reply to  stewart

Those numbers, the whole concept of the HIT, is nothing but a fairy tale.
A myth, a computer model without ANY medical evidence and/or practical relevance.
It was invented by computer modelers, aka epidemiologists, solely for such a situation, to justify vaccinating those people not at risk of a pathogen or disease.
And that very likely on the expressive order and demand of big pharma.
See Gatti&Montanari.

ChrisDinBristol
ChrisDinBristol
5 years ago
Reply to  JayBee

. . . thought herd immunity was shown to be non-existant last year – oh yes, that was natural HI. Clearly only vaccine-induced HITs exist. Oh, by the way, have they explained how a vaccine that doesn’t confer immunity from infection can lead to ‘herd immunity’ yet?

ChrisDinBristol
ChrisDinBristol
5 years ago
Reply to  stewart

Yes! They come near me, my partner or our cats with their poison and lies, then they will be treated as an armed intruder. . .

I am Spartacas
I am Spartacas
5 years ago

Would make me more suspicious and more determined not to have the jab.

J4mes
J4mes
5 years ago

Global government is so concerned about our health and wellbeing that they will bribe us with something that damages our health to take their dangerous fake vaccine.

BJs Brain is Missing
BJs Brain is Missing
5 years ago

You have to ask the simple question “why?”.

What is this obsession with taking the experimental gene therapy? With the money to be made, the power to be acquired, the control exerted over the populace… Can’t think why it is so important… to some.

Moist Von Lipwig
Moist Von Lipwig
5 years ago

What is the point of vaccination if restrictions are maintained anyway?

What balderdash

stewart
stewart
5 years ago

To make the drug companies even richer and give governments more control over their populations. Duhh….:-)

iane
iane
5 years ago

But can it be claimed posthumously?

Cecil B
Cecil B
5 years ago

That’s peanuts

Online I can get £3,000 for a kidney

ebygum
ebygum
5 years ago

WOW! We really live in a world where this is considered vaguely ethical? How far has the human race fallen? I find it absolutely shocking. There is no doubt in my mind that in the next few years when all of this is written about there will be universal horror, particularly to the immoral and anti-scientific depths to which supposed elected Governments around the world have plummeted.
God only knows what we can expect next!

The only up-side is that at least this was in the Times, where they were already preaching to the worst of Covid zealots if the forums on there are anything to go by.

Cecil B
Cecil B
5 years ago
Reply to  ebygum

All depends who writes the history

ChrisDinBristol
ChrisDinBristol
5 years ago
Reply to  Cecil B

The truth will out, it always does. Hang tough, as some (clearly far right extremist) Americans might say, our time will come.

Bella Donna
Bella Donna
5 years ago

No amount of coercion by this government will entice me! The harder they try to force you to take the jab the more you realise this is nothing to do with our health!

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