Colorado Public Radio: Colorado’s $1 Million Vaccine Drawings Are Over. Did They Convince Anyone To Get The Shot?

From the Colorado Public Radio: The last million-dollar entry has been accepted, and the final winner’s name has been announced, but at least one other question remains about Colorado’s effort to increase COVID-19 vaccinations with $1 million weekly prizes and scholarships for minors: Did it work? “It’s hard to answer that question definitively, I think,” said Glen Mays, the chair and a professor in the Department of Health Systems, Management & Policy in the Colorado School of Public Health at CU Anschutz. He said the drawings were novel and helped promote awareness and excitement about the vaccinations but they came after many early adopters already had gotten their shots. So it’s “really difficult to know exactly what, if any, boost it’s had.” It seems likely that the drawings, at the very least, arrested, then slowed, a significant slide in consumer interest in getting the vaccine. Another perspective, also published Thursday, in the New England Journal of Medicine explores vaccine mandates and passports and even a third option: “to raise health and life insurance premiums for people who forgo vaccination.” The approach could “redistribute the higher expected health care cost in a way that is fair to people who have already been vaccinated,” wrote authors Kevin Volpp and Carolyn Cannuscio, of the University of Pennsylvania. Read the full story in the Colorado Public Radio.