If you had bribery on your vaccine bingo card, mark it off.
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I’m down for this. Mainly because i want a million bucks. Should encourage lottery playing fence sitters
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DeWine is also removing masks and social distancing requirements beginning June 2nd. As someone who works in Ohio, I am eagerly awaiting more information on how this may impact our return to office, which is scheduled, interestingly, for June 1st.
Also giving away full tuition to 5 kids between 12-17 at any state school of their choice.
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It will be interesting to track Ohio’s daily vaccinations and see if there is a bump following this announcement.
So if I’m reading this right, 5 vaccinated adults get $1,000,000 each and 5 vaccinated 12-17 year-olds get a free ride to any state college/university. Is that the gist of it?
I’m fascinated at the economics of this. I really can’t wait to see how this plays out.
My parents are in Ohio and are vaccinated. I hope they win!
My area started doing this apparently. I wonder if I should get an early third shot to get in on the action
Vaccine lotteries are a dud. One of the recipients in my state didn’t even know about it until the lottery commission called them. Why not just give cash for shots?
Yeah my state didn’t see noticeable uptick from the lottery
I think they’re targeting, and quite well, a certain demographic.
Doesn’t mean that it’s working.
Might as well pay Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity a few million just to get them to tell their audiences to get vaccinated. That might actually work on the idiopoly (yeah, I’m coining that!).
In Ohio you had to register for the vaccine lottery to win. All my classmates were posting links, so I made sure that my parents knew how to register. A quick Google search tells me that 5.7 million Ohioans have been vaccinated. If we assume that the scholarships are worth roughly $125,000 each, and the cost to Ohio for the million dollar prizes was about $952,030 (since they’ll get about 4.797% of each million back in state income tax) that means Ohio spent around $5,385,150 on the lotteries. Call it $5.4 million with a little overhead. That’s less than $1 per vaccinated person. I don’t think that amount would motivate very many people. Probably fewer than were motivated by the lottery.
Ohio saw a 43% increase in vaccinations the week after they announced the lottery program, but that was a one-time blip. I think it got some fence-sitters off their keisters. And maybe pushed forward the timetable for some procrastinators who were driven more by laziness than anti-vax beliefs. The best use of $5.4 million? Nah, probably not. I think it’s a little unfair to call it a total bust though, even if it fell short of the goals (were there any specific goals? I’m not sure.)
Even if all it did was get some people to the clinics a little faster, that’s still beneficial.
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My home state of MA is doing this now — which is weird, because we are well over 70% of the eligible population vaccinated (currently at 62% of the whole state, and that’s with 0-11 not eligible yet).
5 $1M prizes for 18+, 5 $300K college scholarships for 12-17.
I’m in Missouri, which is doing a lottery with many more smaller prizes. Something like 180 winners each period, for $10k each. Three pools:
a) adults who got vaccinated prior to announcement of the lottery
b) adults who got vaccinated after announcement of the lottery
c) youths age 12-17 who got vaccinated
“All told, 800 adults will win $10,000 cash prizes, and 100 people ages 12-17 will win education savings accounts worth $10,000.”
It will be curious to see whether anyone does an actuarial cost/benefit analysis of these vaccine programs.
The University of Kansas is doing a lottery. I think four students get free tuition for a semester, four cash prizes at $5k each, one Apple bundle (iPad, watch, headphones), and two students will get the most prestigious parking passes offered. That last one is my personal fave.
That list is from memory and may not be 100% accurate.
The parking pass one is kind of brilliant. That’ll be a good motivator for a non-trivial subset of students.
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