Will you get the shot?

This week, I’ll stitch together some thoughts on our ticket off the Covid-19 train, also known as the “vaccine”. I am prompted by Georges Pearkes’ challenge to come up with why it might be a bad idea to given people $1500, or another monetary amount, as an incentive to take the vaccine. First things first, it’s very possible that our main problem next year is that we won’t have enough of this thing. Paradoxically, the prospect of a vaccine dealing a killer blow to the virus in the middle of next year has created an incentive for authorities to maintain tighter restrictions in the short run—well into Q1, at least—while we wait for the shot. After all, if the virus is gone tomorrow, the cost of an infection today increases, a lot. A reasonable counterpoint is that governments aren’t masochists, and some form of reopening will happen in Q1, but the point I am getting is simple in the end. Assuming the vaccine is rolled out by early Spring, on the back of a miserably semi-locked down winter, it’s more likely than not that people will be scrambling for a jab, especially in an environment where the vaccine becomes a ticket to otherwise restricted activities via a form of passport. In such a situation, we won’t have to pay people to take the shot. We’ll have to make sure it isn’t hoarded. 
As for the counterpoint, I am not convinced that the rise of anti-vaxxers—known in the literature as "vaccine hesitancy”—can be applied to predict a threat to the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccine efforts. That said, early survey evidence suggest that hesitancy might be an issue, especially at the margin where the line between failure and success is drawn.

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