the question becomes: do these programs work? the short answer is a qualified yes. incentives have been used and studied in many different fields of medicine and have been used to get people to quit smoking, exercise more and eat better. for example, a study in the bmj , published by the british medical association, found that pregnant smokers who got financial incentives on top of a regular quit-smoking program were nearly three times more likely to quit. not every incentive program is so successful, and long-term change — like dieting and weight loss — is harder to accomplish. but even healthy eating can be achieved with a financial nudge like a sugar tax .
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financial incentives to improve vaccination rates have worked before for other vaccines, and lotteries have been used to boost uptake of hiv treatment , though whether lotteries will push people to get vaccinated against covid-19 remains to be seen. unfortunately we can only know whether some program works after the fact. unfortunately, you can never be fully certain that something will work until you try it.
there has not been enough time to see whether any these programs will boost vaccination rates, but a recent research letter has suggested that simple interventions do help, even if to a small degree. researchers looked at health care workers in pennsylvania and examined whether a simple e-mail reminder could nudge them to get vaccinated. how any health care worker could live through the past 18 months and not see the dire need for vaccination is beyond me, but in this pennsylvania hospital system 41 per cent of employees had not been vaccinated despite having received 36 e-mail reminders over the past five weeks. researchers therefore designed an experiment to see if personalized e-mails, rather than mass e-mails, could get more employees to register for a vaccine. they designed two e-mail templates, one that framed the risks of vaccination against the much higher risks of covid-19, and another that highlighted the societal good that comes from vaccination.
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over a three-day period, the personalized e-mails boosted vaccination rates by three per cent, with both versions performing equally well. while a three per cent increase might seem like a small number, it is actually a significant boost in vaccination rates, and we should remember that incentive programs often work together. thus, financial rewards coupled with a no-appointment pop-up clinic at la ronde , for example, might work for someone who has no major opposition to vaccination but for whatever reason was not motivated to go online and schedule an appointment.
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