{"id":44205,"date":"2021-10-15T19:26:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-16T01:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/lotteries-did-not-encourage-covid-19-vaccinations-new-study-finds\/"},"modified":"2021-10-16T01:26:00","modified_gmt":"2021-10-16T01:26:00","slug":"lotteries-did-not-encourage-covid-19-vaccinations-new-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/lotteries-did-not-encourage-covid-19-vaccinations-new-study-finds\/","title":{"rendered":"Lotteries did not encourage COVID-19 vaccinations, new study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Gov.
Gov. Jared Polis reveals a ceremonial check for $1 million for Sally Sliger, the winner of the first of five Colorado cash-prize drawings for people who got vaccinated for COVID-19, during a news briefing June 4. Sliger, center, and her husband, Chris, left, stand behind the governor. (Gov. Jared Polis Facebook)<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The chance to win $1 million did not lead to increased vaccination rates against COVID-19, according to a new study published Friday<\/a> that examined the states that held vaccine lotteries earlier this year.<\/p>\n

There was a \u201cnear zero\u201d association between those cash drawings and additional vaccinations in states like Colorado, which held five drawings<\/a> among vaccinated people for a $1 million prize.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were really excited when we saw these policies come out and were really hopeful that they were going to be effective, and they just turned out not to be,\u201d Andrew Friedson, an associate economics professor at University of Colorado Denver and one of the authors of the study, told Newsline.<\/p>\n

Dhaval Dave, Benjamin Hansen and Joseph J. Sabia co-authored the study.<\/p>\n

Friedson and his team examined vaccination rates before and after the announcement of a lottery in 19 states, and then compared those rates with those in non-lottery states. They discovered little to no association between the lottery announcement and the number of vaccines administered after that announcement date, indicating that the lottery strategy was ineffective.<\/p>\n

Ohio was the first state to announce its \u201cVax-a-Million<\/a>\u201d lottery on May 12, and other states quickly followed suit.<\/p>\n

The states included in the study were Arkansas, Colorado, California, Delaware, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Washington and West Virginia.<\/p>\n

The lotteries were incentive programs designed to get states to a high enough vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity, or around 70%. It seems, however, that they had little effect in convincing people to get vaccinated. State data shows<\/a> a leveling out of the vaccine rate after the lottery announcement, not the intended uptick.<\/p>\n

Colorado spent $5 million in federal COVID-19 relief money for the five cash drawings.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny dollar that you spend on something that doesn\u2019t work is a dollar that you could have been spending on something that does,\u201d Friedson said. \u201cSo this is, across all the different states, tens of millions of dollars that we could have been spending on potentially more effective policies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Friedson said the study is important to inform future decision-making for public health officials.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe see a policy that seems really exciting,\u201d Friedson said. \u201cStep one is to find out if it works. If it doesn\u2019t work, step two is to find out why and find out what we can do instead that might work better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those latter questions were not part of this study, but Friedson acknowledged that guaranteed incentives, rather than a minuscule chance of a life-changing payout, could work better in convincing those on the fence about getting the vaccine.<\/p>\n

Later on, Colorado also implemented a $100 gift card<\/a> vaccine incentive program.<\/p>\n

There is also the possibility that some people will simply never be enticed to get the vaccine.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother theory is that no amount of money was going to convince people, because they were already convinced they didn\u2019t want it,\u201d Friedson said.<\/p>\n

The study notes that a vaccine lottery is not an \u201cinformative\u201d strategy and that using the money for \u201cmore complete messaging on vaccination\u201d could have been more effective.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have no doubt that all of the governors\u2019 offices that were doing these lotteries had good intentions,\u201d Friedson said. \u201cI\u2019m sure it\u2019s disappointing. But if we have a policy goal that we\u2019re trying to achieve \u2013 which is to get people vaccinated \u2013 we have to be a little bit agnostic about how we get there. If a policy works, we want to do more of that. If it doesn\u2019t work, we want to move away. So we tried the policy, it didn\u2019t work, and now it\u2019s time to move on.\u201d<\/p>\n

The office of Gov. Jared Polis stands by its incentive strategy as a way to surpass the 70% vaccination goal before President Joe Biden\u2019s nationwide July 4 goal date.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will review this study and its methodology,\u201d Polis press secretary Conor Cahill wrote in an email. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to be an arm-chair critic and there will probably be other studies in the years ahead that show the opposite findings.\u201d<\/p>\n

He wrote that the Polis administration \u201cspared no expense, acted with urgency, and took bold innovative action\u201d to deploy the vaccine and end the pandemic.<\/p>\n

The governor\u2019s office also touts the gift card giveaway, a guaranteed reward that the study did not consider, as a major success.<\/p>\n

Cahill said vaccination rates went up in all but five Colorado counties after announcing the gift card giveaway, and some sites in \u201ccritically under-vaccinated communities\u201d saw a demand increase of 300%.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce we launched the gift card giveaway, it was so popular, the state was able to extend it to reach even more unvaccinated Coloradans \u2013 especially in rural and harder-to-reach areas of our state with our mobile vaccine bus and pop-up clinics,\u201d Cahill wrote.<\/p>\n

In Colorado, just over 71% of people are fully vaccinated, according to state data.<\/p>\n

To read more stories from Colorado Newsline, visit www.coloradonewsline.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

drawings and additional vaccinations said to have \u2018near zero\u2019 association<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[685,4224,819,28,668,291],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-44205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-coronavirus-covid-19","tag-gaming-and-lottery","tag-gov-jared-polis","tag-headlines","tag-public-health","tag-vaccines"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44205"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=44205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}