Hey, Americans...

[andygates]

What's with the vaccine-phobia?  Is it that you don't trust sciency-magicky-woo unless it's delivering cars, guns or porn?  Is it that you don't like being told what's good for you?  Is "herd immunity" a dirty phrase to a Rugged Individualist?  How 'bout 'civic responsibility'?  Did anyone teach anyone that the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'?

Tricky moral question for ten points:  If personal freedom is good, and your freedom to swing your first ends at my nose, how about your freedom to stay a seething sump of infection compromising general immunity in the population at large?  Or is that too fecking socialist a concept?

Comments

Re: ten bucks

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Huh. Maybe some kind of thing where multiple visits by a given person or child wouldn't confer any additional benefit... I'd initially suggest using SSNs in the US, but people who drag a bunch of kids back twelve times aren't going to blink at using fake ID numbers, and it might put other people off.

A once-off tax deduction isn't going to appeal to people who either don't pay tax or who aren't going to be filling in their tax forms in the next 48 hours.

Maybe something where people getting vaccinated get a semipermanent ink stamp lasting as long as the clinic was immunising people, and the related food provider stamping over the top of it in the same ink... but I can forsee kids having their hands scrubbed raw to try and erase the ink, or being told to wear a fake bandage/cast to cover the stamp.

An anasthetic skin spray which shows up on an IR or UV camera for a couple days even after showering/bathing? Maybe, although it brings to mind not only mutilation-level scrubbing but also screaming fits on being told they'd been IDed as already having come through once. Plus again with bandages/casts on the slightly smarter ones who figured out the spray was the culprit.

There really needs to be some kind of reward that simply does not inherently stack, and is simple enough so that even the entitlement royalty realise intuitively there's no point going back for seconds or trying to yell a second helping out of the staff.

Free entrance to only one particular movie on presentation of an inked finger springs to mind, but that's not really a wide enough net. It really needs to be some kind of universally appealing thing, reward, event, whatever, which there's also not much point doing twice (or at least twice in the same month, at least). And it can't change from one thing to another to try and get the most people in, as people who want more than one of the rewards will present themselves multiple times again. It can't be something that people could collect a hundred of and use over the next several months or years. It can't be something they can sell or otherwise easily exchange for value. It can't be something they can give away to the non-immunised. Ideally, it can't be something they can hoard and carry away, or indeed anything there was an actual physical limitation on.

Maybe it should be handled like voting - check someone's ID off a list of locals, give 'em their shot and their dollar/taco. Don't know how well that would work in the US, as voting's not compulsory there and anything resembling the government asking for ID could be viewed with suspicion.

Maybe just use ID/SSN/registration to get the ten bucks, but make the jab itself ID-less for those who want the vaccination but not the paperwork?

Hmm. Might not even be a bad idea for voter registration itself. Turn up to vote and if you're registered you get ten bucks. Might help boost voter turnouts. Of course, it'd run to about $500m a year, but in federal government terms that's a rounding error.

Re: ten bucks

[andygates.livejournal.com]

The UK / Japanese approach is to hammer it in as civic duty. Enough people are 'good people' to build herd immunity. The powers that be have a weight of authority here.