U.S. organizations offer more incentives to encouage vaccinations; poll shows progress

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Thu, 2021-05-06 19:00 — mike kraft

US rolls out carrots and expands access in push to get holdouts vaccinated against Covid-19 The United States is offering up freebies, expanding the pool of those eligible and shifting access to local pharmacies in its attempts to encourage vaccine holdouts to get inoculated against Covid-19. Madeline Holcombe and Eric Levenson, CNN CNN

(CNN) The United States is offering up freebies, expanding the pool of those eligible and shifting access to local pharmacies in its attempts to encourage vaccine holdouts to get inoculated against Covid-19.

In the last six months, nearly 150 million people in the US have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine in what is the fastest and largest mass vaccination effort in world history. Still, the US vaccination rate has declined from its peak last month, pushing officials to offer new incentives, known as carrots, to further encourage the wary, hesitant and inaccessible to get vaccinated.

... The National Football League has offered 50 Super Bowl tickets to fans who share their stories of why they wanted to get vaccinated. Baseball's New York teams, the Mets and the Yankees, will offer fans a free ticket if they get an on-site Johnson & Johnson shot. And in Chicago, the city announced a monthly concert series held exclusively for fully vaccinated residents.

Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, is offering a hefty incentive: Full-time students who show proof of being fully vaccinated by August 7 will get a $500 credit toward their courses and another $500 toward housing costs.

Free food and drinks have similarly been offered up to the vaccinated. Krispy Kreme, Budweiser and Nathan's Hot Dogs are offering free doughnuts, beer and wieners, respectively, while New Jersey introduced a "shot and a beer" program to give free beer to those who get vaccinated.

Most directly, a few states have offered to pay those who get vaccinated. West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice said last week he wanted the state to offer a $100 savings bond to residents 16 to 35 who get vaccinated. Maryland has also offered $100 to state employees who get vaccinated.

In a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 47% of people who say they want to "wait and see" before being vaccinated said paid time off to get it would make them more likely to do so, and 39% said a financial incentive of $200 from their employer would work.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offered its own incentive last week when it said that those who are vaccinated do not need to wear masks outside, except during crowded events.

The ultimate carrots, though, remain the Covid-19 vaccines themselves: safe for all types of people and effective at preventing infections, hospitalizations and deaths. The mass rollout of those vaccines has sharply brought down the number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths across the country.

The number of daily new cases in the US has sharply declined over the last month as a mass of Americans have either been vaccinated or previously infected. Experts have said more vaccinations will be key to keeping that number down -- thereby protecting both the entire medical system as well as individual health.

Confidence in the Covid-19 vaccines has been sharply split along partisan lines, but polling published Thursday suggests Republicans are becoming less reluctant to get vaccinated.

The number of Republicans who say they have gotten a Covid-19 vaccine, or intend to get one, has increased 9 percentage points over the past month, from 46% in March up to 55% last month, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation Covid-19 Vaccine Monitor data.

That number roughly coincides with a fall in the number of Republicans who say they definitely won't get vaccinated. In March, 29% of Republicans surveyed said they wouldn't get a shot, and that number is now down to 20%. ...