Associations between Bonus and Lottery COVID-19 Vaccine Incentive Policies and Increases in COVID-19 Vaccination Rates: A Social Epidemiologic Analysis

Do COVID-19 Vaccination Policies Backfire? The Effects of Mandates, Vaccination Passports, and Financial Incentives on COVID-19 Vaccination

Faced with the challenges of motivating people to vaccinate, many countries have introduced policy-level interventions to encourage vaccination against COVID-19. For example, mandates were widely imposed requiring individuals to vaccinate to work and attend school, and vaccination passports required individuals to show proof of vaccination to travel and access public spaces and events. Furthermore, some countries also began offering financial incentives for getting vaccinated. One major criticism of these policies was the possibility that they would produce reactance and thus undermine voluntary vaccination. This article therefore reviews relevant empirical evidence to examine whether this is indeed the case. Specifically, we devote separate sections to reviewing and discussing the impacts of three major policies that were implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic: vaccination mandates, vaccination passports, and the provision of financial incentives. A careful analysis of the evidence provides little support that these policies backfire but instead can effectively promote vaccination at the population level. The policies are not without limitations, however, such as their inability to mobilize those that are strongly hesitant to vaccines. Finally, we discuss how policy-level interventions should be designed and implemented to address future epidemics and pandemics.

Tropical Infectious Diseases of Global Significance: Insights and Perspectives

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are indeed a group of illnesses (Table 1) affecting hundreds of millions of individuals living in tropical and sub-tropical geographical regions of the globe, particularly in socioeconomic vulnerability areas where access to adequate sanitation, a clean water supply, and healthcare is limited [...].

The backfiring effects of monetary and gift incentives on Covid-19 vaccination intentions

We provide evidence that material inducements for Covid-19 vaccination may backfire. Results from a hypothetical survey experiment in China (N = 1365) show incentives of 8-125 USD reduce vaccine uptake intentions compared to simply offering vaccination for free. Ours is the first Covid-19 vaccine study to separately consider and directly compare the effects of monetary and goods-based incentives, both of which have been widely employed by countries seeking to increase uptake; we demonstrate that both types backfire equally. Results are compared against the burgeoning literature on Covid-19 vaccine incentives.

Mining Public Opinions on COVID-19 Vaccination: A Temporal Analysis to Support Combating Misinformation

This article presents a study that applied opinion analysis about COVID-19 immunization in Brazil. An initial set of 143,615 tweets was collected containing 49,477 pro- and 44,643 anti-vaccination and 49,495 neutral posts. Supervised classifiers (multinomial naïve Bayes, logistic regression, linear support vector machines, random forests, adaptative boosting, and multilayer perceptron) were tested, and multinomial naïve Bayes, which had the best trade-off between overfitting and correctness, was selected to classify a second set containing 221,884 unclassified tweets. A timeline with the classified tweets was constructed, helping to identify dates with peaks in each polarity and search for events that may have caused the peaks, providing methodological assistance in combating sources of misinformation linked to the spread of anti-vaccination opinion.

Associations between Public Fear of COVID-19 and Number of COVID-19 Vaccinations: A County-Level Longitudinal Analysis

Background and Purpose: A large number of COVID-19 infections and deaths and the ensuing socioeconomic problems created widespread public fear around COVID-19. Fear around COVID-19 greatly influences people’s attitudes towards receiving the COVID-19 vaccines. The purpose of this study is examining (a) the impact of the public fear of COVID-19 (PFC) on the number of COVID-19 vaccinations at the county level; (b) the interaction effect between the PFC and per capita income, unemployment rates, and COVID-19 vaccines incentive policies, on the number of COVID-19 vaccinations at the county level. Method: This is a longitudinal analysis across states in the U.S. by using county-level data of 2856 counties from 1 February to 1 July. Random-effects models were adopted to analyze the associations between the PFC and the number of COVID-19 vaccinations. Result: the PFC was positively associated with the number of COVID-19 vaccinations at county-level, as PFC increases from 0 to 300, the predicted vaccination number increases from 10,000 to 230,000. However, the associations were divergent when the PFC interacts with county-level per capita income, unemployment rates, and incentive policies. Conclusion: public fear is an important indicator for the county-level vaccination numbers of COVID-19. However, it is critical to consider public fear and socioeconomic factors when making policies that aim to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates.