When the Covid vaccination rollout started, the biggest material prize was an Instagramable sticker. Now in Hong Kong, you could potentially score a Tesla or even an apartment in the world’s most-expensive housing market.
With gold bars, a diamond Rolex and a $100,000 shopping spree also up for grabs, Hong Kong’s vaccine lotteries are easily the flashiest. Yet it’s far from the only location rolling out eye-catching incentives to try and boost flagging vaccination rates. Russia’s giving away snowmobiles. West Virginians can score lifetime hunting licenses and custom rifles. In Alabama, people who are vaccinated got offered a chance to drive on a speedway track.
As the delta variant rips through the world, pleas for people to get vaccinated are becoming more forceful in countries fortunate enough to have abundant supplies. Governments and private businesses are trying a range of tactics, from ads featuring reassuring messages from trusted local figures—like doctors or hospital workers—to efforts in places like France to limiting access to public venues.
Giveaways are the less politically fraught option, though they have raised ethical questions. While policymakers don’t expect such incentives to have much effect on the outright skeptical, the hope is they may give those who are procrastinating a push over the line.
But do they push up vaccination rates?
Evidence is patchy. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of initial surges. In Hong Kong, for example, the number of residents fully vaccinated against Covid-19 has doubled in the last seven weeks to over 2 million people, coinciding with the rollout of a host of private sector incentives.
On the other hand, one recent study of Ohio’s vaccine lottery found no evidence it had increased vaccination take-up though it did suggest rates had slowed less in Ohio than in the U.S. overall.
Where data suggests there is a boost, reasons are hard to disentangle. Is it just the idea of winning something cool, or are people also motivated by the accompanying positive publicity around vaccination drives? Experts mostly agree that incentives are worth trying, because history suggests health messages alone don’t cut it.
“Nudges are what change people’s behavior,” said Noel Brewer, a professor specializing in vaccine uptake research at the University of North Carolina. “Fear communication, or risk communication, is ineffective.”
Effective incentives take into account the context of the local population, Brewer says. North Carolina, he notes, gave $25 payments to people who got their first dose of the vaccine, which might sound small but would have been meaningful for lower-income residents.
In Hong Kong, there’s enough shots to go around, and they’re free for everyone as young as 12. But the rollout has struggled due to a lack of trust in the Beijing-backed government and concern about side effects.
Over 1 million fully vaccinated residents registered for a drawing for a new, $1.4 million apartment—a 449 square-foot one-bedroom unit —offered by Sino Group and Chinese Estates, in the first week the draw was open according to the operators.
Like all of the city’s vaccine lotteries it is a privately run draw. The Beijing-backed administration is leaning on local businesses and institutions to help people get vaccinated after the government struggled to convince reluctant residents in an atmosphere of mistrust following widespread anti-China protests in 2019.