It’s time to start paying people to take vaccines to boost take-up. That’s according to Dr. Raymond Duch, an Oxford academic writing in the Financial Times. This is the lesson he’s taken from the Covid pandemic, apparently.
Dr. Duch, a Director of the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences at Nuffield College, Oxford, writing in collaboration with Professor Philip Clarke, an economist of the Nuffield Department of Population Health, says that their trial of this measure in Ghana (yes, they actually got ethical approval to try it out – now published in Nature) proves that it works. By works they mean that yes, some poorer people will offer you their arm if you offer them hard cash – in this case an amount equivalent to around 15% of the weekly food bill, which is $3 is Ghana and may be around $14 in the U.S. But by ‘works’ they don’t mean that it successfully reduces Covid deaths or illness. They didn’t look at that. And since Ghana had almost zero confirmed Covid deaths, we can assume the (positive) impact of vaccination in the country was non-existent (even allowing that official Covid deaths may be under-counted).
“Some will ask whether paying people to adopt good health behaviours is a desirable route to take,” writes Dr. Duch. Well, quite. Ethical strictures around informed consent usually forbid any form of inducement to take drugs or undertake medical procedures (except in an acknowledged experimental context such as a clinical trial). But this isn’t what Dr. Duch means. He means, will it reduce vaccine take-up in the long run. “Supplementing social norms with cash could erode the public’s commitment to complying with important health campaigns.” But not to worry: it all looks good on that front: “Our Ghana trial explored the effect of the scheme on individuals who did not receive cash for vaccines. Consistent with another recent trial in Sweden, our results showed no negative effect on vaccination levels.”
Vaccine take-up is the only metric Dr. Duch regards as of any significance, apparently.
Yet the trial was hardly a runaway success, even by these narrow lights. The payment group only had 9% higher take-up than the non-payment group – practically a rounding error. This was in February 2022, too, when Omicron was running wild, though perhaps the well-known lower fatality rate reduced demand. It seems most people aren’t willing to sell you their personal medical decision-making, even if they do live in a developing country.
But since Dr. Duch seems to regard this as a way of reaching a 70% vaccination rate (he doesn’t explain why 70% is desirable; perhaps he is still operating under the discredited assumption that this will stop the spread of the virus) he presumably sees it as proof of concept. Simply increase the pay and more people will come forward, is maybe his logic. If so, I suspect he would be disappointed in this. He writes:
The international community spent more than $20bn supporting COVID-19 vaccination campaigns in low- and middle-income countries. It was one of the costliest public health initiatives ever targeted at these nations. Despite this, Africa trailed behind the rest of the world in terms of vaccination rates: a more equitable global pattern of jabs would have prevented the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. And incentivising vaccination with cash would have saved many of them.
Frankly, I find it hard to understand how this study gained ethical approval. Maybe it helped that it was in Ghana; I doubt it would have been allowed in the U.K. It must also have helped that it was an economics study, not a medical one. According to the methods section of the paper it had ethical oversight from the University of Oxford Economics Department. I don’t suppose that department is overflowing with expertise in medical ethics.
Actually, there is one other metric Dr. Duch recognises.
But simply giving cash to some of the poorest individuals in the world, even ignoring the public health benefits, would have positive outcomes. In our trial the effective $3 cash incentive represented about 15% of weekly food expenditures. Scaled up to national levels this would have represented an important economic boost during a severe negative economic shock. In Ghana, for example, a $3 financial incentive would have injected $70m directly into the hands of consumers if vaccination rates reached the goal of 70%.
Vaccination boost and economic boost: what’s not to like?
“The wake of the pandemic is a good time to reflect on how to best navigate global public health challenges when they arise in future,” concludes Dr. Duch. “Small cash incentives to promote uptake could be a game-changer.”
The comments, even in the very mainstream FT, were universally negative beneath this article, which was a relief. “This is so unethical it makes me puke,” says the top-rated comment. I couldn’t put it better myself.
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Perhaps we could pay people to run across busy roads with their eyes shut..?
Maybe the authorities would deny that this causes excess deaths.
So this is about paying people to accept COVAXX shots taxpayers elsewhere paid for. What’s the gain here? Makes it easier to scam taxpayers elsewhere out of their money? If COVAXX shots had significant health benefits, especially on the claimed scale, no one would need to pay people to increase COVAXX uptake.
This is pathological behaviour that has become so ingrained that hardly anyone is able to recognise it’s insanity.
Taxpayers are these idiots who can be called on at any time to pay for the pet idea or pet project of any official, politician or self-styled expert who thinks he knows what’s best for everyone.
I just can’t wait for the whole rotten financial edifice to collapse once and for all.
I’d prefer putting all these not-so-covert Marxists back into their bottles: Do you have a great project which will certainly improve the future of all of mankind? Chances are that you believe this because you’re seriously deluded, that your idea is completely unworkable in practice and that trying to implement it will end up making things worse in a myriad of ways nobody ever thought of before. Even if none if it was the case, your idea would be obsolete long before it became globally pervasive. What about putting some effort into filling potholes in your local area instead? Or improving rubbish collection?
I’m seriously in favour of shrinking the global superstate. The more removed from local circumstances some institution happens to be, the less power should it have to interfere with them.
You could apply that to any subsidy. ——If something is so great it won’t require a bribe a subsidy or tax deduction. Assuming you come from the school of thought that says people know best how to spend their own money. eg No one needed to be bribed to get rid of their horse and cart and buy a vehicle. The benefit of the vehicle was obvious.
At the time when potatoes were still unknown to most Europeans, the king of Prussia, Friedrich II, thought they would make a very useful addition to the crops already grown in his country. The instinctively conservative farmers, however, were unwilling to give them a try and not even offering them seed potatoes for free could change their minds. To overcome this resistance, the king employed the following trick: Waggons full of seed potatoes were driven into villages and tightly guarded by soldiers during the day. The waggons were watched much more leniently at nighttime, though, something the farmers very soon noticed. As they believed the king wouldn’t make such an effort to have these strange fruits under guard unless they were really very valuable, they proceeded to steal as many of them as they could get their hands on under the cover of the nights. Thus was the potato introduced into Prussia.
[German legend]
Perhaps the earliest recorded instance of nudge theory…
Good comment ——-Maybe governments should insist we cannot have smart meters, electric cars and wind turbines and we may all then clamour for them and infact demand them.—–Novel idea. As a child I used to steal my sisters sweets and offer her them back for something else of hers I wanted.
I think that’s a different story. The people in government are IMHO perfectly aware that electric cars and wind turbines cannot be used to supplant already widely deployed technology, especially considering that neither of both is new idea but an old one discarded due to technical inferiority. What they really want is tax people for not using or not exclusively relying on this technology.
The point of the comment was mostly supposed to be that people not in government are just as likely to make unwise choices as people in government. The luddites would be another example. From their perspective, they only saw that machines were stealing their jobs and that this caused problems for them. They didn’t (and couldn’t) know that this development would ultimatively lead to a level of general prosperity hitherto unkown to man. Nowadays, even professional beggars have smartphones (many of them at least).
“unwise choices” ??? —I could forgive unwise choices if they were genuine mistakes. But everything Green is not a mistake. It is an ideology, and it seems they all subscribe to it or they are OUT.
This is called bribery. #
The Nuremberg Code requires Informed Consent for a medical intervention to be carried out ….. with no coercive behaviour or inducements to distort the process.
So basically, Dr Mengele, sorry Dr Duch is advocating the abolition of the Nuremberg Code.
Another sign of the vaccine campaign ‘tremendous success’. hope it’s the beginning of the end of the corrupt pharma’s grip on the population, who will start thinking critically even if conclusions will be contrary to what BBC and the rest of the captured media say.
After the Northwick Park clinical trial horror of 2006, there were those keen to participate in trials because they discovered that you could get paid for it. That was when the economy was in a far better state than it is now so less of an incentive for many.
Although many here would class the Covid jollop as ‘experimental’ there are no significant clinical trials attempting to assess the safety and effectiveness of the ‘safe and effective’ juice. The proposal does not seem to be to encourage participation in well designed and run clinical trials but to increase take-up of established vaccines for a public health benefit.
I sincerely hope that before pursuing any such course of action and spending money on bribing the reluctant, the authorities have a clearly stated aim including how they will measure the outcome. In particular, if they expect a public health benefit how will this manifest?
This proposal strikes me as crazy – convince people it’s beneficial and they’ll take the stuff.
Yes, if it’s easy to motivate some when presented with actual horrors it should be much easier to motivate more when it’s for products already approved by “fiercely independent” regulators such as the MHRA.
After that they could try treating the voters.
Are they giving money because there’s nothing to take away from these people to coerce them into getting injected? Taking away the ability to go on holiday worked in the UK.
The thought that such a role and organisation exists made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
LOL! Desperation much?
“I wouldn’t be in Edmund Exley’s shoes for all the whiskey in Ireland”—– Lt Dudley Smith 1997. ‘LA Confidential’ “I wouldn’t go near the clot-shot for neither love nor money.”—–Me, just now.
Here in Valencia its been announced that as of today, 5 jan, the health department have re-introduced Covid-mask rules in all hospitals and health centres in the Valencian Community. following a surge in cases of patients with breathing problems.
That’s bound to help eh?
Excellent idea. As an unvaxxed taxpayer, I already pay for the “vaccines” so that people can be made ill with them – now I will also pay for poor people to be poisoned.
Of course he only looks at boosting “vaccine” uptake as a goal in its own right – that is consistent with “Public health” approaches.
Precisely. He will be interested in the effectiveness of his Experimental Social Sciences experiment. Not measuring the supposed public health benefit.
I do find it puzzling that while Joe Public sort of understands that most people trying to sell him stuff are basically going to be trying to get away with selling things of the lowest quality they can get away with, at the highest price, if you stick a “Public health” or “It’s for your own good” label on something then suddenly whoever is trying to sell you stuff becomes Jesus Christ come back to Earth, rather than just another scam artist on the make/take. Why do people trust doctors more than estate agents? Surely only because the consequences for medical misconduct ought to be worse for anyone transgressing – loss of a very lucrative career. But now that the state encourages doctors to poison people, there seem to be no consequences.
There are about 1.5 billion people living in Africa. That’s a hell lot of
depopulationvaccination opportunities. Plus, nobody cares much what happens to them, not even BLM afficionados in the USA. It’s just going to be difficult to convince anyone to pay for the shots when nobody’s willing to get them.“Plus, nobody cares much what happens to them, not even BLM afficionados in the USA.”
I’m not convinced that “BLM aficionados in the USA” care much about black people in the US either, except themselves.
People used to be offered free hot dogs in Germany in exchange for getting covaxxed.
” paying people to adopt good health behaviours ”
The assumption here is that vaccination is an unquestionable good health behaviour. This is being claimed by Dr. Duch, a Director of the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences, and so no medical expert. Over the last 4 years it has been increasingly clear that vaccines equal; power, money and control so much so that inconvenient matters such as efficacy and safety can be airily brushed aside in the pursuit of the glittering prizes that vaccines can bring.
I agree but would go further and say that the state has no business defining “good health behaviour”. Apart from anything else, it’s very hard to define and seems somewhat moveable, and varies from person to person – and of course I now don’t trust the state to define anything honestly or competently. It can’t even stop our roads flooding after a couple of weeks of rain.
Completely agree tof.
I wonder on what ways a “Centre for Experimental Social Sciences” adds to human happiness (other than their own). I don’t see how any such centre could add to my happiness, and as such I don’t want to pay for it. Life is surely not all that complicated?
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/why-the-time-was-ripe-for-an-authoritarian-takeover/
A worthwhile read although I am not quite convinced that Desmet’s theory of Mass Psychosis provides the explanation.
Well I suppose it will help their funeral costs.
In America, people were paid to donate blood. That worked out well.
With warehouses full of unwanted stock. I wonder what commission he’s on?
Paying people to commit suicide – excellent public health plan for depopulation. Wonder where he got that idea from?
And the taxpayer pays for their own death , double whammy!!!
Unbelievable abdication of moral and ethical responsibility!
It prompted me to research Professor Duch’s profile online and his role in the Cambridge Anaytica scandal. A very superficial preliminary trawl of readily available online data gives me great cause for concern.
This deserves an in-depth article on the role of data analytics and the role of behavioural sciences in relation to elections and pandemics in particular. These are very relevant to current and future policies influenced by shadowy figures and embraced by government’s on a global basis.
The funding of this research is of course hidden from view!
Dr Douche