OPINIONS: How to reach the unvaccinated --payments and numbers

Late last week Michael Brendan Dougherty of National Review stirred up a mix of interest and outrage among journalists by arguing that more understanding should be extended to unvaccinated Americans, whose hesitancy about getting Pfizered or Modernafied often reflects a reasonable uncertainty and wariness after a year of shifting public-health rhetoric, blunders and misleading messaging.

The alternative perspective, judging from responses to his column, regards the great mass of the unvaccinated as victims of deliberately manufactured paranoia, the blame for which can be laid partly on their own partisan self-delusion and partly on wicked actors in the right-wing media complex — from conspiracy theorists flourishing online to vaccine skeptics interviewed by Tucker Carlson to Republican politicians who have pandered to vaccine resistance.

The sheer numbers of unvaccinated Americans — upward of 80 million adults — means that these perspectives can be somewhat reconciled. On the one hand, there is clearly a hard core of vaccine resistance, based around tribal right-wing identity, that’s being nourished by both online conspiracy theories and the bad arguments and arguers that some Fox News hosts and right-wing personalities have elevated.

On the other hand, the ranks of the unvaccinated are much larger than the audience for any vaccine-skeptical information source and far more varied than the stereotype of Trump voters drinking up QAnon-style conspiracies. The vaxxed-unvaxxed divide is widest between Democrats and Republicans, but it’s also an education divide, an age divide, a gender divide, a racial divide, an urban-rural divide, an insured-uninsured divide and more. (My strong impression, based both on vaccine-hesitant people I know personally and anecdotes that show up in reporting, is that it’s a “good experiences with official medicine”-“bad experiences with official medicine” divide as well.)

The Kaiser Family Foundation has polling on vaccination rates that’s helpful for seeing both of these realities. In its survey, you can see the core of conservative resistance: Among Republicans, 23 percent say they definitely won’t get the vaccine, and among white evangelicals, 22 percent say they definitely won’t, figures that are higher than for almost any other subgroup in the poll.

But Republicans aren’t simply isolated in their own partisan world. Vaccine hesitancy abounds outside the conservative base, and overall vaccination numbers for Republicans and independents actually look more alike than the numbers for independents and Democrats. (52 percent of Republicans have had at least one vaccination; for independents, the number is 61 percent; for Democrats, 86 percent. Meanwhile, a full 16 percent of independents are a hard no compared with just 2 percent of Democrats.)

...  So is there a way to substantially expand vaccinations in the narrow window of the next six months without going in for heavy-handed, possibly counterproductive interventions? To me the only major idea that seems worth considering is the simplest one: We could start paying people to take a vaccine — not just in lottery tickets or even the savings bonds issued by West Virginia but in big fat gobs of cash.

... There is solid evidence that even $100 payments can move the needle for the vaccine-hesitant. If you paid $1,000 per two-shot regimen — a limited-time offer, good only through October — and 10 million or 20 million people took you up on it, it would be a rounding error in the Biden infrastructure plan, and it would probably pay for itself just in reassurances to a jittery stock market. ...

ALSO SEE: Opinion: The two numbers that could get people to take the vaccine -_Washington Post